


Cats Are Fine Too

by Blackmarch



Category: RWBY
Genre: Alternate Universe, Arranged Marriage, F/F, F/M, Funny, Harems, Oral Sex, Sex, Vaginal Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-25 00:24:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20715038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blackmarch/pseuds/Blackmarch
Summary: His dreams of becoming a Hunter crushed before they even began, Jaune finds himself adrift... Momentarily. Not for long at all, really.He already had a career path lined up for him to fall back on; the creation of Faunus and the expansion of his family holdings on the frontier. Not exactly what he wanted to do with his life, but its a living.And at least he still gets to go to Beacon...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a commission, done for someone that wishes to be anonymous! I hope you guys enjoy it!

  
Jaune’s journey to the next part of his life, his seguing into adulthood, into heroism and adventure, began a great deal like most things in his life did. Or, at least_ had_ up to this point in his very short and miserable existence.  
  
With embarrassment. With humiliation. With resignation...with his sisters laughing at him from behind his back. You know. The usual.  
  
Having his mom join in on it was different though. Definitely different. There was that.  
  
“You’re lucky to be going to Beacon in the way you are...” Jaune’s mother, Juniper, said with the sort of tone that she used when she wanted to scream at someone but couldn’t. The one she used when she had to speak out of the side of her mouth, with a plastic smile on her face as she kept the source of her ire in the corner of her eye. She was positively _livid_...and Jaune just wanted to crawl into a hole and hide. “If I’d had my way, you’d have been grounded until you were in your twenties.”  
  
“But, mom…”  
  
“But, nothing.” Juniper calmly cut him off, her gaze still on the incoming flight to Beacon, making to dock even as she spoke. “Do you know what could have happened if you’d been accepted only to be found out as a fraud later?” She shook her head. “Did you even think about what you were doing before you did it, or was it just one of those spur of the moment things? Like your goldfish, and that very short interest of yours in learning how to play the guitar?”  
  
Jaune winced, hoping that no one had heard any of that...but not really expecting that would be the case. That would be too easy for him, wouldn’t it? His mother could be so unreasonable...but he knew when to fold. He wouldn’t have survived this long if he hadn’t. Seven sisters was a minefield. “No, mom. I didn’t think.”  
  
“Clearly. If you had, you’d have realized that an orange jumpsuit was the least heroic thing imaginable.”  
  
“It wouldn’t have been that bad…”  
  
“It really would have, Jaune. There are _laws_ against that sort of thing.”  
  
The girls giggled and it just got even _worse_.  
  
Monsters. All of them, monsters. From Autumn to Marigold. Complete, unfeeling monsters. Getting those transcripts forged had taken him _months_. Actual months. He’d been close enough to taste the success, right on the tip of his metaphorical tongue...only to have it snatched away by Mauve looking through his room for blackmail material. AKA, his porn.  
  
To say that she’d struck dirt, finding the falsified transcripts in the loose board behind his bed even if it hadn’t been what she’d been looking for, was an understatement...and it had him fuming even now, impotently furious as he flexed his hands in and out of a pair of fists.  
  
Did a man not have a right to his privacy? Did a man not have a right to the sweat of his brow and the fruits of his labor? Did a _man_ not have the right to explain himself to a jury of his peers?  
  
… Why was he even asking these questions? He already knew the answer. The world was a cold and uncaring place. If it hadn’t been, he’d have had Crocea Mors at his side and been wearing his grandfather’s old armor. That he wasn’t carrying either of those things showed just how fair life really was.  
  
“Be happy with what you have, Jaune...and be happy that I don’t have to pay your bail.” Juniper tsked, bringing Jaune to a new low he hadn’t even known existed. Beyond the theoretical, of course. She always seemed to find the next level, somehow. “Also, girls.” The matriarch gave her head a minute turn, just enough to see Jaune’s sisters out of the corner of her other eye and stifle their snickering. “He’s been punished enough. You haven’t. Don’t push it. And Mauve.”  
  
The youngest of Jaune’s sisters, mouth in mid-chew and fingers tied up in her light purple hair, froze in place as she was singled out. Froze, gave her gum one more run and tried again. “Yeah, mom?”  
  
“You’re grounded. Doesn’t matter what you found. You just wanted to embarrass your brother and I will _not _reward you for that. Am I clear?”  
  
Mauve winced, nodded, and went completely silent as she felt the thin ice she was on started to crack right under her feet.  
  
It was a distinctive feeling, that. One that she totally deserved too, that little… Well, he supposed that things could have been worse. He wasn’t quite sure how it could, seeing as his hopes and dreams of being anything like his Grandfather had just been ground into the dirt...but, yeah. It could have been worse… Grimm attack, maybe? That might do it.  
  
When a Grimm attack failed to materialize, Jaune found himself surprised. It just felt thematically appropriate for what was happening to his life right then...and, right then, as everyone his age got into orderly little lines and began shuffling their way into the terminal, all he wanted to do was push this off. To go without having to face his failures for just a little while longer, even if it was just in his own head.  
  
He felt terrible. Horrible, actually… And, now, he’d just made it even worse by thinking on it like he was. He was disappointed after having his life goals and dreams go up like a cheap firework, sure, but he wasn’t an _asshole_...or without a brain between the ears.  
  
Not _everything _had gone wrong. He just had to be willing to see the possibilities. To accept a change in perspective.  
  
He had suffered a setback, was all. A tiny thing, once he thought about it. He was still going to Beacon, even if it hadn't been in the way he planned. He still had a chance. There were probably procedures for people who wanted to switch tracks...and if there wasn't, so what?  
  
The difference between an accredited Hunter and a Hero was just a piece of paper, right? … Right. Now, smile, Jaune. People were watching.  
  
Juniper, seeing Jaune’s attempt to smile in the face of diversity, frowned. Just a slight downturn of the lips, accompanied by a weary sigh. “You're looking cheerful.”  
  
“I’ve never been outside of Ansel before,” Jaune pointed out, using the painfully lonely truth as a smokescreen. His mom might suspect otherwise, seeing as it sometimes felt like she could read her mind, but... “Why wouldn't I be cheerful?”  
  
“You're going to be traveling by airship, for one.”  
  
A bead of sweat popped up on Jaune's forehead. He'd honestly forgotten that that was a thing, what with all the excitement. “A-ah...well…”  
  
“For the next four hours. With no stops in between,” she continued dryly as Jaune started to feel a little green. “I’m glad to see that you’ve finally gotten over your issues with flying.”  
  
“Well, you know me, “Jaune said with a nervous laugh just before he gave his mom a hug. A quick one that, thanks to his mom latching onto him in a way that had forced him to peel her off him first, with her giving him a suspicious glare the entire time, wasn’t so quick. If his luggage hadn’t been moved ahead of time, he’d have been totally screwed. “Not going to let a little thing like some stomach trouble keep me down.”  
  
“I’m sure.” With that dubious agreement and one last squeeze with a kiss on the cheek, Juniper reluctantly, and finally, let him go. “Now, go on. You don’t want to miss your **flight**, do you?”  
  
… Yeah. She knew. She definitely knew. Stiff upper lip, Jaune. Stiff upper lip... he had no choice as to otherwise.  
  
The airship he was taking to Beacon was a public one. He hadn't expected much different, but it was worth noting. After all, while his family might have been notable, and might have had a bit of a nest-egg, they weren’t the sort to throw money around for something as unnecessary as a private flight. The Arcs preferred to keep themselves relatively grounded...at least compared to their peers.  
  
If he had anything to be happy about, it was that he was flying first class. He got his own bathroom and everything and no one got to see him embarrass himself. It was the little details that mattered.  
  
Like the number of tickets in his hand. That was a thing.  
  
Jaune glanced down at them as he backed away, then back up to his mom, then back to his hand. Tickets. Plural. Three of them. “Uh...are you guys coming too?”  
  
“No.” Juniper shook her head. “And no, that isn’t a mistake. Don’t worry about it...but it would probably be best if you went straight to your room.”  
  
“But…” Jaune’s extremely short case of hope and levity started to die in his chest as several, highly unpleasant, reasons as to _why _he had two extra tickets came to him. “But _why._”  
  
His mother’s gaze went completely flat. “You’ll figure it out.”  
  
==========  
  
“PLEASE, NO!” Were the first, somewhat shrill, words to leave Jaune’s mouth when he walked into his room. Completely reasonable words they were too, in tone and context, when something had just brought you to the ground by tackling you from the side without warning. “NOT LIKE THIS!”  
  
There was a _Faunus _on his chest. An actual, live _Faunus_. She couldn’t have been anything else. It wasn’t exactly hard to tell, considering the ears. The yellow eyes. The canines sharpened to a needlepoint. That blank look you only saw on newborns or the dangerously _broken._  
  
She sniffed and bent her head down low to take another. Longer, deeper, before she stuck her face into the crook of his neck. Right against his jugular, a nip and a pull away from tearing his throat out and stripping his neck of muscle like it was a fleshy stick of string cheese.  
  
Jaune was glad that he had taken the time to use the bathroom before he’d even got on the airship. Very much so, in that vague sort of way that came with a near death experience… When they found his body, the only fluids they’d find him covered in would be blood and, possibly, tears.  
  
This was a horror story come to life. One of those that the other kids used to tell around the campfire in their backyards but couldn’t have been real...but worse. Because, you see, this was _real_… All the quirks had been worked out of the current generation his skinny, pale behind!  
  
“Blake! No! Bad Blake, bad!”  
  
The Faunus (Blake) on top of him stilled. Nose still against his neck, hand still on his chest. Rear on his…not important. A-anyway, she was completely still but for her very noticeable breathing.  
  
“Don’t make me get the bottle!”  
  
‘Blake’, after a short and heart-stressing wait, huffed and pulled away from him. From horizontal to vertical, on her front to her feet in the blink of an eye. Then, acting as if she hadn’t even noticed him in the slightest, she jumped onto the only bed in the room, stole the only pillow, and made to take a nap...all while an older woman, sitting on a chair in the corner, looked on with a smile.  
  
“W-why?” Jaune whispered, his worst (non-lethal) nightmares finally realized. “Why are you here?”  
  
“Well, after that whole mess where you tried to get into Beacon with fraudulent credentials…” Kali, the Arc family nanny (and bodyguard) for as long as Jaune could remember, started from behind her sleeve with a chuckle. “You didn’t think that you’d get away without some form of supervision, did you?”  
  
“... Sort of.”  
  
“And wasn’t _that_ silly of you?”  
  
==========  
  
His scroll said that four hours had passed.  
  
Jaune, hands on his knees, sweat on his brow, and a trashcan not all that far away, burped. Actively avoided eye contact with the parade of giggling girls and laughing boys passing him by while Kali, nearly overbearing as always, rubbed his back and cooed comforting things to him. Gentle things that reminded him of his not so long ago childhood and several different situations that had led to something just like this.  
  
The roundabout at the park. The car on a bumpy road. That one time he’d been on one of those paddle boats that had looked a great deal like an abysmally tired swan. Him and public transportation had never seen eye-to-eye...and, today, showed that nothing had changed just because he was away from home. In fact, things might have been _worse_.  
  
There hadn’t been so many people around to see the tatters of what remained of his self-esteem, you see. Vehicles of any sort hated him and his scroll was lying to him. Four hours? An absolute eternity. A wheel of torment and misery that-  
  
“He smells like he’s going to die,” Blake mused out loud, a comparatively welcome interruption to the hell his life had become. Comparatively. He just _felt _like he was dying. “I can see why his parents gave him to us to watch. He’d have probably curled up somewhere dark and expired without us.”  
  
Having someone bring up how close he was to ‘dying’, even if they’d probably just come off the assembly line a week ago, wasn’t exactly pleasant. He was going to live, damn it!  
  
“He’s not going to die.” Kali huffed, clearly and, in Jaune’s modest opinion, inappropriately amused even as she defended(?) him and continued to rub his back. “He just has motion sickness.”  
  
“Motion sickness?” Blake said slowly, seemingly tasting the word as she rolled it over in her head and on her tongue. “What is that?”  
  
“You really are new, aren’t you? Lucky you, having someone like me to show you the ropes, my ‘daughter’.” Kali chuckled at Blake’s quiet bristling and reflexive hiss. “It's a human thing. Caused by conflicting signals from multiple senses. As you can see, and smell, it is highly unpleasant and uncomfortable.”  
  
“... That’s stupid.”  
  
“It’s human. They can’t help it.”  
  
Jaune, instead of sighing in the face of the pity that was being thrown at him, spit some more. Wished he had a bottle of mouthwash at hand. When a handkerchief came in right after his wish instead of the ever elusive bottle of mouthwash and started cleaning him up, he didn’t complain. He really wanted to, don’t get it wrong, but he didn’t.  
  
This was better than nothing...and besides. This was _Kali _doing it. This was _Kali_ who was cleaning his face, rubbing his back, and being vaguely disparaging about the human condition. Telling her off for trying to help him would be like telling off his mom…sort of. The difference here being that telling off his mom would have involved a lot less silent disappointment and a lot more emotional and financial pain.  
  
The money that he’d used to buy his false documents hadn’t come from thin air. His allowance, while not exactly extravagant, had been just enough for him to set his plans in motion and pull it all together with a couple of months worth of saving. The lack of ‘X-ray and Vav’ in his life, while a painful sacrifice, had been necessary...and he really hoped she didn’t find out that she’d been his main source of funds.  
  
He’d probably starve to death if she did. She’d cut him off and Man did not live on private school cafeteria food alone. Oh. Oh, lord, _food_...**_no_**.  
  
“Please don’t start that up again. You’re a big boy. Control yourself. You have a big day ahead of you and you can’t afford to spend all of it standing over a wastebasket,” Kali said as she forced him to stand up straight by pulling him up by the collar before she forced a bottle of extra-strength mouthwash into his hands. She then glared at him in that way only she could do, not blinking even once until he’d filled the cap and taken a swig...and boy did it _burn_. “You have orientation, luggage pickup, and a meet-and-greet with your guardian, not necessarily in that order—”  
  
Jaune, just about done with the gargling as it was, took the chance to cover up his shock by spitting to the side instead of outright and in front as he’d almost done. A close thing that. Blake, her ears twitching with a dark interest as she examined him from her spot a couple feet away, wouldn’t have been at all happy about that if he’d had. “Guardian? I thought I was living in the dorms!”  
  
“Don’t interrupt someone when they’re talking. It’s rude,” Kali scolded him absently as she began bustling him towards the school and a hair to the side. Off the path the rest of the students had taken and away to what, if he squinted, might have been a door in the wall. A side entrance, maybe. “And that was the plan, at first, but extenuating circumstances had to be accounted for. Old promises, family debts. You know how it is.”  
  
“I don’t, actually.” That had sounded a great deal like he had just been handed a great, big helping of _responsibility_. The sort of responsibility that might have been a tad over his head and didn’t involve heroics or acts of daring do. The dancing around that Kali was doing when it came to the subject didn’t escape or comfort him at all either. In fact, he was starting to sweat again and it was only seventy degrees out. Anxiety, and a growing sense of dread, were killers...and he had to wonder when the ride was going to stop. “ But none of that sounds very good.”  
  
“... I supposed that it could be looked at in that way if that’s how you want to do it. But it really could be nice if you apply yourself and look on the bright side of things.”  
  
And that was just about enough for Jaune that day. The shock that he’d just got, if he hadn’t already discharged the contents of his stomach and what had felt like a fifth of his weight, would have led to him doing it all over again. Even then, it was a closer thing than he would have liked it to be.  
  
Kali tended to understate things. A lot. And there wasn’t exactly all that many ways you could take that particular end to a lead-up… Apply himself? Bright side of things? Right now, what with the way his day had gone so far, he couldn’t find it in himself to think that that meant anything good.  
  
“Now, I haven’t met the woman that you’re going to be living with personally—”  
  
Jaune made a sound. A sound was all he would call it because that was all it _could_ have been called. It definitely wasn’t a_ bleat_, no matter what the dictionary said. More of a strangled, choking cough. Much more manly, that.  
  
“—but she sounds like a wonderful woman. She’s established, respected, intelligent and very strong. Very good with children and she has _wonderful _hips.” Kali turned to look at him with a questioning frown. “That _is_ what human boys your age are into these days, yes? I’m not all that good at following trends these days. What did you learn about that sort of thing, Blake?”  
  
“That it’s often the other way around when it comes to the age difference and...that wide hips are still the ‘in’ thing,” Blake replied softly, hesitantly, as if remembering things that she’d long ago tossed to the side for being ‘useless’. Jaune, from many a day trying to learn Vacuan in a mandatory language class, knew how that was. If it lasted past the test he was doing something wrong. “It is expected to last for another generation before being phased out by cultural shifts coming from Mistral but, until then, business as usual.”  
  
“Thinner is better, I assume?” Kali asked as she dragged Jaune, his planted heels doing nothing to help him, the last few feet to the door and started brushing him down. Fixing his collar, cleaning off imaginary specks of dirt from his nose and wiping not so imaginary stains from his shirt. “Or is it something else?”  
  
“... Thinner. With large breasts. Around the size of their head.”  
  
“Wonderful. Just wonderful,” Kali groused, “yet another thing that won’t last. Like learning how to hula hoop all over again. Took me months to learn all the tricks and, by then, all the children had moved onto something else. Amateur bodyart, I believe. Didn’t last all that long either...and aren’t those two bodily attributes at odds with each other?”  
  
Blake sighed, the warmth of her breath against the back of Jaune’s neck enough to make him shiver...shiver, and wonder how he hadn’t noticed just how uncomfortably _close _she was. Had he really been that distracted? “_Humans_.”  
  
Good, _god_. Had she practiced how to cause ASMR on demand or something? It had felt like his bones had given a go at leaving his skin behind.  
  
“You aren’t wrong,” Kali continued, unknowing or uncaring about his discomfort as she made him closer to what she might have considered to be ‘presentable’. “I’m happy to see that the new batch has something besides Grimm stuffing in between their ears,” She admitted, Jaune’s school tie in hand as she redid the knot near to the level of suffocation. An attempt to loosen it just got the offending limb a slap and she didn’t even look before moving on. The similarity to a noose, to him, was jarring. “Now, Jaune. I understand that you might be feeling more than a little nervous. Scared, perhaps, being so far away from home. Having to meet new people, living with someone you’d never met before...”  
  
“I’ll be fine, Kali,” Jaune responded stiffly, the implication that he couldn’t handle being out on his own for once in his life enough to get his dander up where everything else had (very roughly) slid off his back. “I’m seventeen. Not seven. Living with an adult instead of people my age,” as had been the plan, he didn’t say, “isn’t going to break me.”  
  
“I didn’t expect it to. Of course not,” She stated with one last pull at the fabric on his shoulders and an upwards turn of the lips that might have, if one were so inclined, been called a smile. “You just remind me of your father, all knees and elbows and horrible pickup lines. Adorable.” The somewhat smile disappeared. “Please don’t use any of the pickup lines that you heard come out of your father’s mouth.”  
  
Jaune grimaced. “Really? You’re going to bring that up? They aren’t even that bad.” That was just over half of his material. If he didn’t have that then what _did_ he have? His stunning good looks and his height, sure, but that didn’t get you all that far these days. If it had, then high school in Ansel would have been a much different place.  
  
“I disagree. Strongly.” Kali verbally shut him down. Then, she added a little force to it by stepping out of the way so that Blake could give him a light push towards the door without falling all over her. That they’d coordinated that ahead of time wasn’t lost on him. “Now, stop stalling and face your destiny.”  
  
“You’re not making me feel any better…”  
  
“Well, that’s odd. I could have sworn I heard that you weren’t seven anymore.”  
  
==========  
  
To say that Glynda wasn’t entirely pleased with her current...situation...would have been an understatement of the highest order. She was happy with her life as it was. Perfectly content as the Vice-Headmistress of the greatest Hunting School in the world.  
  
This meant that she still had no idea how she’d wound up, having to live with a teenager. A boy that could have almost been her son, sitting on her couch, looking like he had been put through the wringer. Pale features, messy hair, bad posture—  
  
“H-hello,” He cleared his throat and reached out his hand for a shake. The slight tremor in it was barely noticeable. “My name is Jaune. Jaune Arc...and I’ve been told I’m going to be living with you while I get my education?”  
  
—and not nearly mature enough for her tastes… That she had to actually get to know him was not how she’d wanted to spend her time. Not nearly. She’d have rather visited one of Peter’s lectures. Or that monstrosity he’d built in the basement, ‘Fort Port’...no. She lied.  
  
She’d see him dead before she went back to that place.  
  
“Glynda Goodwitch,” She answered primly as she extended her own hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mister Arc, and I do hope that our time together will be a good one.”  
  
“For sure!”  
  
This was who she was to marry if things went well...not that she thought it would. But they’d see.


	2. Chapter 2

When Glynda woke up that morning, it was to something touching her foot...and that didn’t hit her as something strange at first. That might have sounded funny to some people. Disturbing maybe. Those people, of course, had never had a cat in their life.  
  
A cat. One. Singular. All she’d needed, all she’d wanted up until the poor thing had passed away at the venerable age of fifteen years. She’d never had the heart, or the time, to get another. Effectively raising Remnant’s future defenders was a fulltime job and getting another inside pet wouldn’t have been fair to them...and that was what had her suddenly go stiff in her bed and her eyes snap open as wide as they could get.  
  
Mr. Fluffy had been dead for five years...and, if she hadn’t been awake before, then she definitely was now. Something touching your feet without warning while you were asleep and a pair of large, amber headlights in the dark tended to do that sort of thing, you see. She didn’t even think about reaching for her riding crop. She just did it. That it wasn’t _there_, on her nightstand where she’d left it, was yet another heart attack, layered onto the first.  
  
“I’m hungry.”  
  
Glynda’s heart, beating as hard as it ever did since she’d become a school teacher and stopped taking nearly so many trips into the wilds, slowed so hard it felt like it had come to an outright stop.  
  
“Where is the food?”  
  
She had guests now. Multiple. She’d forgotten. Nothing she’d needed or wanted, but she was stuck with them for the next four years. Depending. That one of them was so young as to still identify as a feline more than a Faunus was just an odd and somewhat uncomfortable quirk that she’d had to deal with more than once in her life. She bet that, if she were to look move her nightstand, she’d find her riding crop stuck between it and the bed. Knocked down there by something with far too much energy and not nearly enough activity to occupy its time.  
  
Mr. Fluffy had used to do much the same whenever he was bored, much to her woes. A flick of the eye towards the clock at the right-hand nightstand. The clock that had _used _to be on her right-hand nightstand, forcing her up with a sigh to look for it while Blake silently watched. Another glance _down_ and it was five minutes before she’d had to wake up for the day.  
  
Eyes closed once more, this time in exasperation, she took a deep breath and started going around for her slippers.  
  
That was fine. Decent. Grand. Any earlier though, and may whatever God that still watched over Remnant have mercy on her students, for she would not. She was stern with them already, as much as she needed to be to make sure a horde of hormonal teenagers was on task. Six hours of sleep and coffee so strong as to be nearly solid were the bare minimum she demanded for her service as a teacher and Deputy Headmistress to one of the best schools in the world.  
  
Was that too much to ask?  
  
“Food,” Blake whined. Maybe. The dull drawl that was her tone didn’t exactly fit with Glynda’s idea of ‘whining’... No. Of course she wasn’t whining. That was silly. She was just making a statement of fact and was asking Glynda, the owner of the house, to correct whatever issue she might have had. Glynda must have been more tired than she’d thought. Jaune had been surprisingly - difficult - to deal with last night. “Hungry.”  
  
She’d unlocked his Aura before going to bed...and, she had to say, it had been one of the most _exhausting_ examples of such that she could remember. The resulting light show in the comparatively dimly lit room the process had been done in had momentarily dazzled her, while Kali and Blake had been outright blinded. For a complete civilian to have that much Aura was unheard of.  
  
If it hadn’t been for the fact that she was responsible for him, she’d have never done it. He idolized the Hunter lifestyle but knew nothing about it. He had no training, no understanding of the weight that the title of Hunter came with... But she had. She’d had to.  
  
He might not have been going into the combat classes, yes, but that didn’t much matter with some of her students. The rough sort, young and drunk on their own power. She got loads of those every year and having to give Jaune’s parents a call, telling them their son was in the hospital because someone had given him a ‘friendly’ slug in the arm, wasn’t something she felt up to doing.  
  
Her family owed them too much to leave his health up to chance.  
  
Shuffling into the kitchen in a pair of slippers and her pajama suit, Blake following close behind in a way that Glynda considered the human-sized equivalent of winding through one’s legs, the blonde started off the day like she normally did. Digging into the cabinets and pretending not to be embarrassed by how she lived, mostly. Dry cereal, granola bars, milk and the first portion of aforementioned death coffee that had been left to brew overnight weren’t the signs of someone who was a homemaker.  
  
She’d never been able to pick up the knack. Never had the time or the inclination for it, once she became a teacher. The school provided for her well enough, much like it did her colleagues, and buying things for decoration and the sake of it had never sat right with her as a matter of course...that she’d never had guests over had just made the decision to continue doing so an easy one was all.  
  
That her standards of living were now biting her on the butt was not lost on her. Unlikely to change much, seeing as she was as busy as she ever was, yes, but not lost on her... She’d have to see if Jaune had a stipend of some sort. He had his own space and she had hers. He didn’t have to live like she did if he didn’t want to...to a point.  
  
If he started shoveling junk food into his face, they were going to have to have a very pointed talk. Also, an exercise regimen that he’d enjoy as much as she did the school’s bi-weekly staff meetings. In other words, he wouldn’t enjoy it at _all._..that he didn’t have to worry about funding issues on top of that was a blessing he’d probably never understand.  
  
His had been an easy life. All he’d had to worry about was his grades up to now, and that was still the case. Lucky him.  
  
When Glynda turned around, done with pretending that she had far more food in her pantry than she actually did, it was to find Blake face deep in her bowl of milk with cereal bits in it. An eighty-twenty split from what the blonde could tell and Blake was lapping at it like the cat she’d been based on...not that it seemed to be working all that well, from what Glynda could tell. Blake’s tongue wasn’t nearly as long as it had used to be, being human standard, and it was putting a major hitch in the Faunus’s breakfast.  
  
Now, Glynda had heard that younger Faunus were more than a little...odd, at first...but she’d never seen the truth of it in person. Most students who were able to afford a Faunus of their own had had them for a while, long enough for them to internalize the basics of human social skills and reactions. That it was the reason for why she just stood there longer than she had to, bemused as milk and cereal got everywhere but into the girl’s mouth where it belonged.  
  
She had to admit, she had little experience to go on in this case...and she had to wonder just _why _Jaune had brought her. Kali was understandable. If it was the same one that Glynda knew of, then it was more than understandable. It was only common sense...but Blake? It felt like a little much. Ah, well. That was none of her business. If his family had sent her along, she assumed it was for a reason.  
  
“You’re making a mess. Here,” Glynda offered, the mug of coffee in her hand all she needed to wake herself enough to pull a spoon from the drying rack and put it just to the left of Blake’s head. In response, the Faunus stopped trying to eat and went still, her ears upright and alert. “You’ll find this easier.”  
  
Lifting her head with a frown and a chin covered in milk, she gave Glynda what might have been the most awkward stare the educator had ever seen in her life. Awkward on her end. Blake, being who and what she was, was completely unbothered by this as she, without breaking eye contact, picked up the spoon. Lightly twiddled it, spun it around in between her fingers like she was checking the balance of a knife without a hint of hesitation and perfect grace, better than some of her older students could have if they’d tried, and started eating. Slow and mechanical, like a machine starting up...and Glynda finally understood why she was here.  
  
Maybe she’d been a little hasty when she’d unlocked Jaune’s Aura...she hadn’t seen a War-model in just under a decade. Two in a single day was just overkill, pure and simple. Were there extenuating circumstances she hadn’t been told? Like, maybe, a squad of assassins or a Mantle hit-squad remnant waiting in the wings? … She’d have to ask. After breakfast.  
  
If it had waited this long, it could wait a little longer.  
  
Glynda, in a much smoother mirror to Blake, began to eat...and Blake continued to watch her the entire time. She didn’t even blink, not once that Glynda could tell, as she began to emulate the human woman. Her movements loosened up, became more natural at an, ironically, unnatural pace. Faster, definitely...and a great deal less uncomfortable to watch...up until the point where Glynda finished, dropped her spoon, and the clatter of metal on ceramic caused Blake to twitch.  
  
Blake’s bowl cracked. Straight down the middle as the point of the Faunus’s, now very blunt and bent, spoon came down on it with a textbook downwards knife thrust that she clearly hadn’t even thought about. An accident it seemed, the wide eyes and laid back ears pointing to as much...and Glynda’s doubts vanished like they had never been.  
  
That had been a Pavlovian response to a sound a great deal like a blade hitting one of the more common types of armor...and she should have unlocked the boy’s Aura before he’d even walked through her door. What kind of problems was the boy facing when a clearly human threat was the focus of his protection? … Other than the obvious, of course.  
  
He may not have been the heir, his eldest sister, Sapphire, having been saddled with the role the day she was born, but some folk didn’t much care about family secrets or things of that sort. Money was money, and the only male that the Arcs had in the current generation would be worth quite a bit when it came to a ransom. That he was so far away from Arc lands and their sphere of control was the most likely reason for such a strong response...and she had to admit to feeling more than a little miffed about it. Professionally.  
  
She was one of the strongest Huntresses on record in all four Kingdoms and a near household name. She was no stranger to the, lamentably, human element of her job when the Grimm weren’t a problem...and Beacon wasn’t exactly a hole-in-the-wall. The response to an attempted kidnapping, or worse, on the grounds of the school would have been painful and unrelenting...and that was before they _really _got put through the wringer.  
  
Semblances that dealt with the mind were rare. Rare, but not unheard of. If there was any place in the world that had more than a few of those sorts on hand… On second thought, no. She could use all the help they were willing to give her, her professional feelings be damned.  
  
“Jaune will be up soon,” Kali, a so far invisible presence in the household besides yesterday’s introduction, informed as she silently padded down the steps from the second floor. That her clothing, loose, flowing and lightly decorated with ribbon, hadn’t made a whisper of noise that entire time made Glynda twitch. Internally. The knowing look in the older Faunus’s eyes made it hard, but she managed. “Five to ten minutes, at the most.” She tilted her head slightly with a shrug of the shoulders, an act so _human_ that Glynda’s brows furrowed slightly in response. “Of course, this is a new place. Waking up in unfamiliar surroundings can muddle the results.” Kali eyes quickly darted all over the kitchen, taking in the details before stopping on the broken bowl and the now flat-eared younger Faunus. “They’re always so _messy._”  
  
“I would imagine so. Not even used to having human intelligence, having language almost literally poured into them.” Glynda said, using her Semblance to repair the bowl before Kali could reach it. As one of the few bowls she owned, having it go in the trash for no real reason didn’t sit right with her. “No real context to pull it all together...”  
  
“I was talking about children in general,” Kali said cheerfully while wiping off a very unhappy Blake’s face. “Although, I suppose it still applies. Maybe. I won’t argue.”  
  
Glynda paused, the spoon floating in the air half-straightened. She looked at the pair, at Kali fussing over Blake, trying to get the last bits of milk and cereal off of her face… At Blake not being at all happy about it, pawing at the other Faunus’s hand in an attempt to squirm out of her grip. Much like a child would.  
  
The Arcs were known for their...‘eccentricities’...amongst the well-to-do and high-society. Which, in her opinion, as someone who had actually been _forced_ to meet with these very same upstanding members of society, meant that they acted like relatively normal, well-adjusted people. However, their habit of using the deadliest examples of their business as nannies and companions could be considered odd, maybe even suicidal, by just about everyone.  
  
Using Faunus labor was often considered a status symbol, and the handful of Faunus that they had at the school were lifesavers. Sometimes even literally... But almost no one trusted them with children, and the few that did were families that had fallen on harder times or were just so _arrogant_ that the dangers of doing so never quite hit them until it was too late… Once again.  
  
Even then, the Arcs were something special.  
  
The Arcs were the only one that would let a War Model in the same room as their children, let alone in polite company. The fact that they allowed the oldest living one in public knowledge, a soulless remnant of the Great War, to take care of generations of their children had had people calling them mad. Rumors of such models going rogue or turning on their masters with age were common urban legends and horror stories, for good reason. Glynda knew there was some truth to these rumors. More than a little. She’d had to clean up in the aftermath more than once.  
  
Of course, that these Faunus were often found to have been _mistreated_ in said aftermath never got the traction it needed to change anything. That these beings came from Grimm made such cases a foregone conclusion… Watching the stark contrast to how Kali clucked her tongue at Blake for getting milk on her clothes was startling.  
  
“Ummm... Kali? A little help?” Finally coming down, just short of the ten minutes that Kali had given him, Jaune stood at the landing while was fiddling with the tie of his uniform. Trying in vain to make it look passable...and failing, badly, by creating what was clearly a noose. “I can’t get this on right.”  
  
Kali snorted. “Of course not. Your father and grandfather were the same and I wouldn’t have expected anything less.” Kali, with one last swipe at Blake’s face with a handkerchief, went to Jaune and took his tie in hand. A couple of deft hand movements and he had a picture-perfect tie. “Once, your mother and I got so sick of your father always asking for help that we made him do it over and over. We gave up when he somehow hung himself from the fan.” With a pat on both shoulders, she sent a much less blue-in-the-face Jaune to the breakfast table before switching verbal tracks. “Also, groceries. I understand that you are a very busy woman and that you might not have the time to get them, or to entertain guests… That is fine. You won’t have to worry about that with us. We can handle our own affairs.” Kali finished off-handedly.  
  
Glynda felt a flush start up on her face at that. “No, no. I don’t mind. I’ll go shopping after I finish my duties.” She said, deeply embarrassed by Kali’s pointed comment about her shortcomings as a host and trying not to show it. “Speaking of my duties, we need to be there early to sort things out.”  
  
This was going to take some getting used to.  
  
==========  
  
When Jaune arrived at the school, the plaza he found himself in was surprisingly empty. Surprising in the sense that, thanks to his first impression of the place (and school in general), he’d expected it to be packed to the gills with students on the way to class… Or whatever it was that Hunters in training did in the mornings. Hitting training dummies, maybe? Running an obstacle course? He hadn’t had the chance to ask before Gly-_Professor Goodwitch_, had taken Kali and Blake to the registry office.  
  
He’d been a bit too busy dealing with a sense of awe to actually listen to what she’d said, much to his detriment. Hopefully, she hadn’t said something _really_ important. It would have been just his luck if she had though… Anyway, it wasn’t nearly as packed as he’d expected it to be. A student here and there, latecomers. People that looked just as lost as he was, if not more… It was weirdly normal, actually. Kind of a letdown.  
  
“Arc.”  
  
Either he was getting better at being sociable, or he was just that emotionally worn out from the happenings of the last two days… Either or, he didn’t visibly react or even twitch when he heard that familiar, low-key condescending greeting.  
  
“Weiss!” He replied happily as he turned to look behind him. “How are you? I haven’t seen you in months!” He then tried to keep the smirk off of his face when her eyebrow twitched and the arms she’d crossed over her chest tightened. It was funny, just how badly a polite and well-meaning greeting messed with her. All that high-society stuff was such a pit, it was little wonder his family didn’t bother with it more than they had to if the little things got to them like this. “Was that really your last concert?”  
  
She pursed her lips, her eyes narrowing slightly before she forcefully relaxed them. “Yes.”  
  
“Oh…” His shoulders fell slightly, the act of dejection not at all faked. He’d liked her singing, what else could he say? That their families happened to compete in terms of business didn’t change that...and why would it? Being friendly never hurt anyone. “That’s a shame. I thought you were pretty good.”  
  
“Thank you. But, honestly, I never would have expected you to be here.” She recovered with an inspection of her nails, in an attempt to regain her poise and momentum while insulting him. Classic and almost trite at this point. But it was a good opening move… There were very good reasons as to why Jaune avoided parties. This was one of them. By now the constant barbs, insults, backhanded comments, and scheming was just irritating...that he wasn’t any good at it just made it worse. “Where are your sisters? Have they moved ahead?”  
  
… Okay, that one kinda stung. Nothing he’d never heard before, of course, but it still hurt. “Yeah. I can see why you would think that.” He easily replied while scratching the back of his head, going along with the Arc family's secret technique of not playing the game at all. The perfect defense. “But, nope. Just me. I’ll make sure to tell them that you asked after them though!”  
  
Even after all these years, no one had come up with a strategy for worth a damn for when their target refused to play. Not even the Schnee, seeing as Weiss had just puffed up her cheeks in annoyance and look as if she were inches from strangling him...and it made her look cute, more than anything. Funny that.  
  
“You smell nice,” Blake observed from just over Weiss’s shoulder with a slow blink that had the white-haired huntress jumping away with a barely held shriek.  
  
“Blake!?” Jaune shouted (not screamed), as he took a step back.  
  
“Yes,” Blake affirmed her identity flatly, not even giving him a sideways glance as she gave the Schnee Heiress an unblinking up and down.  
  
Weiss shuddered.  
  
“Where did you come from?” Jaune started again, carefully. “Weren’t you with Kali and Professor Goodwitch?”  
  
“Got bored.” She said as she took another step towards Weiss while the white-haired girl took three back. “Found something better.”  
  
“Arc! What in the name of the Gods is wrong with your Faunus?”  
  
“I don’t know, Little Miss Mass Production!” Jaune snapped back, coming out with a complaint that more than a few critics had brought up over the years by instinct. “You’d know more than me, wouldn’t you!?”  
  
“_We don’t make War Models!_” Weiss snapped back, the only thing keeping her back from ending up against the wall being a literal wall as a hand started inching toward her waist and rapier. “Call her off, before I’m forced to do something we’ll both-”  
  
“Pet me,” Blake said simply, cutting whatever tension (of which there was a lot) down to the bare minimum with just two words.  
  
“... What?” Was all Weiss could say to that, the word summing up exactly what Jaune was feeling.  
  
“Pet me!”  
  
“Why!?” Weiss cried out, once again summing up everything that Jaune was feeling right then.  
  
This was so out of his realm of experience it wasn’t even funny. Kali had never acted like this that he could remember, and he’d never heard any stories that might have implied as much. Blake was brand new and of an experimental type, yes, but that still wouldn’t explain such odd behavior...had he been right about her on the ship, about her being broken? … He hoped not, but it would explain some things...like what was happening now.  
  
Blake had stopped talking and was now bumping her head against the crook of Weiss’s neck in a silent demand for touch while the human girl’s face began to turn an interesting shade of scarlet… Oh well. As long as she wasn’t getting viciously mauled to death, everything was fine.  
  
“No! Never!” Weiss sputtered, trying to pry Blake off of her. That it seemed to only encourage the Faunus, just forced her to redouble her efforts in a vicious and, once he realized that Weiss wasn’t about to get her throat torn out, funny cycle. “This is demeaning to someone of my position!”  
  
“Maybe you should just pet her?” Jaune sheepishly said, his lips twitching madly as he forced himself not to smile. This was weird but in a good way. Better to be confused than the alternative, socially horrified, yes? “Maybe she’ll leave you alone then?”  
  
Blake responded to that suggestion by nuzzling into Weiss’s neck while the girl started to babble and her eyes started to dart from side-to-side. Looking for help, or looking for witnesses to silence (with him as witness number one, obviously) as her right hand started to rise. To pet or to smack, no one knew.  
  
“Hey! What’s going on over here!?”  
  
And no one would ever know as this overly affectionate standoff was interrupted by the arrival of someone that was _clearly _younger than everyone there other than Blake. Someone with brunette hair, red tips and, as Jaune’s eyes shifted about to take her in, a cloak… Strange. How many people had a cloak, even amongst Hunters? Hadn’t they gone out of style when he was five or something?  
  
“Is this a hazing thing?” She continued, oblivious to the appraisal she’d been subjected to as she cocked her head to the side and narrowed her eyes. “B-because if it is… I’m gonna… I’m gonna do something that you aren’t going to like!” She stammered menacingly(?) as she started towards them, a hand reaching back and into her cloak before Jaune or Weiss (whose response was a total mystery) could even attempt to explain the situation in progress... And then, she tripped, and they had much bigger problems to worry about.  
  
The half-opened Schnee bag at her side, as well as the lacy blue _something _that had wrapped itself around her ankles, explained everything to Jaune...and Kali really needed to do something about Blake before she killed them all by accident. That was starting to become a serious concern.  
  
“Nooooooooooo!” Weiss said in a long, drawn-out scream as the interloper just about _twirled_ into her trolley, knocked it over, and caused the contents to spill out. Clothing. Reading material. Unidentified cylinders and vials of Dust as Blake jumped into action, grabbed Jaune under the arms, and leapt away with a shriek of her own as the world became noise and fire.


	3. Chapter 3

Jaune, in his time at Beacon, had repeatedly found himself surprised by the smallest things. Most of the time, it was over how much things hadn’t actually changed. Oh, there _was _change, of course...but barely anywhere it mattered that he could think of, besides the venue and some, quite frankly, _odd_ differences between Hunters and Civilians that still left him feeling kind of uncomfortable.  
  
Without Blake (even if she’d caused it in the first place), he’d have exploded on the first day of school. That wasn’t an exaggeration either. He’d have gone up in a ball of smoke and charred Arc bits...or so had been his thinking at the time. He hadn’t quite internalized that he had Aura yet so, while everyone else had been...not happy, but fine, he’d been hyperventilating from behind a nearby tree. Freaking out about how he’d almost died while everyone else had brushed themselves off and Blake had given him a blank stare, as was her wont. Not exactly comforting.  
  
Weiss still hadn’t forgiven him for the loss of a good third of her dust stock and an entire bag of clothing. He hadn’t expected her to, knowing her as much as he did, but it had been a month already...and it wasn’t like she couldn’t have afforded a million more of whatever she’d lost. At this point, Jaune suspected that her enmity was running purely on habit and sheer bloody-minded spite.  
  
He’d given up on changing that, deciding it was a lost cause a while ago. Sometime around his eighth birthday actually, when she’d called him a weedy something or other… Ruby made up for it though. After he’d come out, helped her out of the crater, and explained himself, she’d been very understanding about everything. She actually kinda reminded Jaune of himself, but cuter. The older, overbearing, more socially aware and developed sister that overshadowed her in nearly everything hadn’t hurt that comparison in the slightest.  
  
They’d bonded quickly over shared experiences...and he was more than a little glad he hadn’t brought Crocea Mors. When everyone else had a weapon that was also a gun and you were the only one left out...that sounded like a situation that would get awkward quickly. Like a fart in a business meeting, where the currency you were going to lose that day was the respect of your peers and that new kid mystique.  
  
_A_ _sniper-scythe_? Who had thought that one up and what had they been on to make turning such a thing into reality sound like a good idea? He couldn’t even begin to imagine how to use it himself...but, from seeing her in action, it was apparently workable and not at all deadly to the user even if it really should have been. It didn’t matter how much you weighed or how strong you were. A single shot being all you needed to get on top of a building was an impressive amount of firepower and more than enough to cave his chest in like a steel toe boot on a sand castle.  
  
There was something to be said about having a friend that was stronger than you, thought you were funny and _really _liked your cooking...even if they were a foot shorter than you and two years younger. School, he’d come to realize, was more than a little similar to what he’d heard prison was like on late night TV...besides the fact that he’d never been forced to throw Blake at someone and hope for the best, obviously. Similar didn’t mean the same after all.  
  
He was pretty sure that Miss Goodwitch would have had something to say about that if he had… Oh well. Winchester didn’t seem the type that was going to last all that long in school or in the real world from what Jaune had seen (felt). From what Ruby had told him, Cardin and his team weren’t exactly at the top of the board in anything…which wasn’t surprising. Anyone willing to pull on a Caerbannog breed’s ears as a joke, repurposed as a fashion model or not, was too stupid to live.  
  
Coco was an odd one but, seeing as she’d inherited Velvet from her mother and wasn’t dead yet, she’d clearly read the manual and hadn’t been repeatedly dropped on her head as a child. Or ate enough paint chips to fill a can with. Good for her.  
  
Flicking his pencil away to ping against the decorative vase in the middle of Glynda’s table, Jaune let his face hit his homework so that he could wrap his arms around his head with a groan.  
  
Right now, he felt like _he’d_ been eating paint chips. He was no slouch when it came to school work or anything, but he was starting to get the idea he wasn’t supposed to be doing it all by himself. It was possible, yes, but not exactly what he was supposed to be doing. That was just an idea though. He had no real proof that this was the case...all he had to back him up was that, unlike everyone else his age, he wasn’t in the Dorms right now. Instead, he lived with one of the teachers. A hot older woman that wasn’t around for most of the day anyway, and didn’t have the time to really help him when she was around.  
  
If he’d been a Hunter, his life would have been so much easier. He’d have been cool. He’d have had all kinds of friends and been invited to all the best parties. His confidence, stunning good looks, and impeccable martial skills would have seen him through everything that might have come his way… Yeah. That was how it would have been. How it _should _have been.  
  
Jaune, his now aching skull still buried in the hollow of his arms, groaned once more.  
  
His golden years. Gone before they had ever really existed. Here lay Jaune of Arc, Hero. Savior...and totally not a virgin anymore, shut up, Amber.  
  
… But no. Those days were, once again, gone. Here he was, stuck calculating optimal Dust-to-air ratio for various ammunition types for a specific calibur, one which was currently falling out of favor in the face of customized calibers... A series of events which had only resulted in him getting assigned homework on how to calculate the ratio for said custom calibers. Which was, thanks to there being no such thing as standardization when it came to custom work, at least 10 times more complex thanks to the normal formulas not being nearly so robust as they had used to be in the face of this multi-headed monster.  
  
This wasn’t even _Hunting_ homework. Purely civilian, administrative stuff. This was the sort of logistics that came with the management of a village or a compound. The sort of work Sapphire had been raised on. _This was not his specialty._  
  
His fingers were grey from the sheer amount of graphite on them. His hands were cramping. He was almost out of pencil lead. The scrap paper bin was clean and - wait. No. That wasn’t right. It should have been overflowing… Right?  
  
Jaune could only stare at it. His brain so fried from the sheer amount of math he had to do, and him forcing back a bout of frustrated tears over the past three hours, that it wasn’t working anymore. Not correctly anyway. No thinky good, much dumb. No know make fire. Booga.  
  
… Was he losing his mind? Because it was starting to feel like he was losing his mind.  
  
“I emptied it a few times while you were busy,” Kali’s voice pleasantly chimed in, reminding him that he wasn’t alone and assuaging some of his doubts as to his sanity. That made a lot more sense. “I was thinking that you might have needed a little pick-me-up.”  
  
A cup of tea was placed in front of him, still steaming and minty. With a dash of honey too, just like Jaune liked it. The blonde drank from it without even thinking about it, his expectations fulfilled as always and he’d never thought it would have been otherwise.  
  
He had no idea what he would have done without Kali. Or what his parents or sisters would have done for that matter. She’d been a part of the Arc Household for longer than any of them, besides his Grandfather, had been alive. If anyone would know anything and everything about them, their every taste and preference, it would be her… Living without her chocolate chip cookies, or her subtly murderous yet watchful presence was a life he didn’t want to even seriously contemplate.  
  
Those two things weren’t at all unconnected. He’d had his fair share of cookies after a couple minutes of frolicking through a supposedly safe forest clearing had turned into a game of hunter and prey, with a random Grimm as the hunter. He’d never made that happen on purpose or anything. He just had one of those faces, he guessed...that he’d never even got himself a scratch during one of those times could have been considered a miracle by some people.  
  
In his family’s opinion though, it wasn't a miracle. It was that Kali was just that good...also, what the fresh _hell _had he been doing out there in the first place? Supposedly, going out into the woods without telling anyone was a bad thing.  
  
… He knew that was a bad thing _now, _yes. But still. It wasn’t like Kali, or any of the other Faunus in his family, would have ever let him get hurt. Not without a fight. They were better than that and, even as a child, he’d known that; to a dangerous degree, perhaps, but he’d known it, and still did, all the way to today.  
  
If there was something that Kali couldn’t handle by herself, Jaune never wanted to meet it. The difference between a hero and a martyr wasn’t the type of difference that he enjoyed contemplating all that much. Making a difference or not, he kind of wanted to see it after…and he didn’t think he’d be the only one to go out in a blaze of glory if that ever happened. That was just a hunch. An inkling, really...it made sense.  
  
Kali raised a brow at him questioningly, most likely due to his sudden case of silence, and he gave her a weak shrug and a smile in return as he listlessly tapped the end of his pencil on paper.  
  
He might have had some problems when it came to his own safety (he’d been told his views were a little skewed when it came to danger...), but other people were an entirely different matter. Being a hero meant helping people and, if people didn’t need help, there would have been no need for heroes. It had been the perfect job for him, he’d thought.  
  
It would have been different, at least. His sisters had their own things going on, the ones that were old enough for it. His younger sisters weren’t exactly talentless either, each of them excelling in school or sports or art. All the things that he’d...never been all that good at when he’d got around to them...that line of thought led to nothing but depression. Depression, and an empty bag of cheese puffs.  
  
He needed to do something else. Anything else. There was still light outside, and it wasn’t like classes lasted all day, right? Maybe Ruby had some free time...?  
  
“Yeah. I need a break.” Jaune dropped his pencil and pushed back his chair. The screech of the legs on the floor, and the disapproving look he got from Kali, made him wince.“Sorry about that. But it’s true. I’ve been staring at the paper for the last thirty minutes and I’m not going anywhere fast..”  
  
“Is it really that hard?” Kali asked politely as she plucked Jaune’s cup off the table, nothing inside of it besides the dregs, and gave it a slight spin between her fingers. “What is the problem?”  
  
Jaune gestured at it. Also politely. If he could have gotten away with it though, you’d better believe that he’d have been a lot more expressive about it. “See for yourself.”  
  
Kali, with that invitation, did. She looked hard and long, her face unmoving as she took it all in. It was a long wait.  
  
“... Well?” Jaune prodded hopefully.  
  
“Well.” Kali lifted her head. “It looks like you humans can’t even leave math alone for more than twenty years at a time. The last time I saw something like this, humans were still poking things to death with swords and spears. _Normal _swords and spears.” She clicked her tongue with distaste. “This Mechashift nonsense makes everything so complicated. What’s wrong with specialization, I ask you? One tool, one use? I’m going to have to relearn my numbers because of this. Again.”  
  
“... So…?”  
  
“I’m utterly lost,” Kali admitted shamelessly as she flapped her hand dismissively at him. “Get out of here. You’re clearly not getting anywhere by yourself. Take your work and show it to that friend of yours.” Her nose scrunched lightly as her lips pursed. “The one with the eyes. She’s good at that sort of thing.’”  
  
Jaune sighed a very tired sigh. “Her name is Ruby, Kali. Not ‘the one with the eyes’. I know you don’t like her but, come on. She’s my friend. Saying her name won’t hurt you.”  
  
“You don’t know that.” Kali sniffed as she bustled past him and into the kitchen, most likely to go wash the cup she’d brought him. The only one she’d be bringing him today, if he was honest. Even if she’d suggested him meeting up with Ruby, she was going to be in a bad mood for the rest of the day. “Now, go. Do whatever it is that boys your age do these days. I have dinner to make and math books to read.”  
  
“Yes mom,” Jaune let slip out of his mouth as a joke. Just a little snark to round out the day...and his hair instantly stood on end as the room’s temperature, metaphorically, dropped like a rock.  
  
“I know your mother’s number by heart. Want to say that again?”  
  
“Going!”  
  
==========  
  
“Huh....” Ruby scratched her chin with the sort of intensity one normally saw in Mistralian martial arts flicks. Like a wise elder that had found themselves faced with a new but interesting problem that their skills had been made for. “I can see why you came to me now. This is some, uh…” She squinted at the paper some more. “Stuff. Oh, jeez… Why are they even asking you this? Where would anyone even get this kind of money anyway?” She pointed at a line somewhere near the bottom. Somewhere... Jaune didn’t care about the specifics. It was all the same in the end. “Do you _know _how much a full cargo container for Grade-5 Milspec Dust _costs_?”  
  
“It depends on the market and what kind of Dust you’re asking for. The location, how badly you need it, and the danger involved in the delivery matters as well,” Jaune remarked sullenly as Ruby’s dog, Zwei, chewed his shoelaces to tatters. Damn thing had never liked him and Jaune had to admit that the feeling, past their first meeting, was mutual… If Ruby and him hadn’t been such good friends, he’d have told a teacher about him by now, damn the consequences. That he could afford more shoelaces, thousands of them, wasn’t the point. It was the principle of the matter. “It can go from five-hundred-thousand at best to two-million at worst...from what I’ve heard. And, if you’re unlucky, you’re just throwing money and supplies down a well.”  
  
He’d never been told the reasoning for that, but he could guess. He wasn’t _stupid_. He’d wanted to be a Huntsman for a reason.  
  
Ruby, at the very thought of the numbers involved, and no doubt catching the implications, cringed. “_Oh, jeez_. I was just going to spitball a really high number or something. That’s even worse than I thought.”  
  
“Yeah. That’s what I said when I heard it. Saw it. Whatever.” That there had been lots of screaming into a pillow involved after the first hour of mulling the work over had passed didn’t need saying. “There’s a lot of work that goes into making a compound work. More than most people think… God forbid the generators run dry for some reason or that the bullets run out. Might as well bend over and kiss your butt goodbye if you’re out on the frontier when that happens.”  
  
Ruby’s jaw hung loose for a second before coming back up so that she could form her lips into a pout. “Well aren’t you just a big ball of sunshine? Why they haven’t put you up on one of those happy outgoing colonist posters, I have no idea.” Ruby poked her tongue out at Jaune to show there were no hard feelings. “Seriously though, this is just homework. We can think about all that other - stuff later. It’s kind of a bummer, you know?”  
  
… Oh. It kinda was, wasn’t it? He had a right to be bummed out though, with homework like this.  
  
“Ah… Whoops.” Jaune ruffled the hair at the back of his head sheepishly. “Sorry, sorry. Homework blues, you know?”  
  
“Pfft,” Ruby rolled her eyes at him in commiseration, “tell me about it.”  
  
“Well, okay. I’ve been trying to work on this for the last two hours and-” A grinning Jaune was interrupted with a snort from Ruby and a slap to the shoulder. “Couldn’t resist.”  
  
“I can see that.” Ruby hummed as she pulled a pencil to herself. “Alright. First off, first question. You are under siege.” Ruby’s brow furrowed as her cadence started to slow. “You were recently resupplied with enough food for six months. Four months have already passed. You have a hundred-sixty occupants that each take up three units of food per day. There is no resupply or reinforcements expected until another week has passed, due to the nature of the threat. Accounting for expected casualties, set at ten percent per day, how much food will be left...over?” Ruby raised her head, visibly horrified. “What the...the…” Ruby buried a hand in her hair. ”What the snickerdoodling heck, Jaune!?”  
  
Exactly. _Exactly._ He’d used stronger language, of course, but _exactly._  
  
“... Yeah. Professor Peach is kind of…” Jaune coughed and looked away from Ruby’s accusing glare. For someone with such a cute name...they were kind of… Yeah. This wasn’t his fault! Blame the system, not him! “That isn’t making this any easier.”  
  
“Maybe we can work on some problems that aren’t so…horrible!” Ruby said with forced cheer, trying to bring the mood back up in that way she did.  
  
“Not really. They’re all like this. She’s a morbid kind of person,” Jaune said with a sigh as he got up to reach for his backpack… Only to find himself flat on his face.  
  
He’d forgotten about his laces.  
  
“Damnit, Zwei!” Jaune cursed his canine nemesis. First Blake, and now this? Was it all connected?  
  
“BARK!” Zwei barked triumphantly as he took a victorious stand on Jaune’s rear and looked to Ruby for praise.  
  
Ruby, in turn, slapped a hand against her face and proceeded to pretend that nothing had happened.


	4. Chapter 4

Jaune returned home the conquering hero. His head held high, papers crisp and clean and covered in enough finely lined graphite to fill a small quarry. This was ace material, he could already tell; Ruby, being Ruby, had been the deciding factor in this battle. Other than the yawning pit in his stomach, one that he was greatly looking forward to filling with some of Kali’s home cooking, things were as good as could be expected for what he’d just done.  
  
His homework hadn’t exactly been all butterflies; flowers and sunshine hadn’t been around either. The food and casualties question hadn’t even been the worst of the lot. Not even close. That the questions had been based on, from what he understood, _serious and very real issues and how they were dealt with_, wasn’t helping with his mood in the slightest. Or anyone else’s that he could think of that had been exposed to it.  
  
His class wasn’t exactly full of bright-faced alumni, ready to take on the day. Not anymore, if they had ever been. School being school, one had to take that with a grain of salt.  
  
Ruby, as an example as to the effects of the soul-crushing reality that she’d been exposed to, by the end, had been quietly thoughtful. And maybe a little teary...and maybe halfway through a bag of emotional support cookies and a box of four-ply tissues. Understandable...even if, all together, that was nothing more than a recipe for disaster.  
  
At this point, he was just hoping that Yang didn’t take that the wrong way when she found Ruby like that. That she listened first, at the least. Jaune didn’t know her all that well, that was true, but he didn’t have to know her all that well to know what she’d do if she thought that Jaune had done something to Ruby that he really shouldn’t have. Or that she reacted to things before she thought.  
  
That Miss Goodwitch would have something to say about his state after she’d found out that Yang had hoisted him up over a beam and went to town on his ribs was very cold comfort. He liked his ribs. Ribs were good, and so were friends. One protected your organs and the other protected your self-esteem. Useful, those... Of course, talking to Ruby again, after an experience of that sort had happened, misunderstanding or not, would be kind of hard...and not just because he’d be eating food through a straw.  
  
Trauma did that sort of thing.  
  
Anyway, forget that nonsense! Things were fine! He was fine! This day was fine! He’d finished all his homework for the week and now he had nothing to do besides relax and do something he didn’t have to think about or on. Something basic, something that wouldn’t teach him anything besides how to waste time and be happy about it.  
  
… There was a pile of unread X-Ray and Vav comics under his bed. A pile that really should have been read a long time ago, if not for all the learning and social navigation (with mixed results) he’d been doing lately. Their time had finally come. Heck...if he wanted, he could turn on the tv too; double up on his mindless relaxation with some of the white noise from early afternoon cartoons.  
  
Kids had the best shows. Sad, but true… He’d make a day of it. Why not? He had a couple of hours until Glynda came home, there was a bag of chips with his name on it, and the daily news could go get stuffed.  
  
Jaune had just gotten done hearing about what happened at the outskirts of civilization. Any extra news of the sort was purely unwelcome.  
  
Right. Now, where _was_ the soda, really? Damned things were never in the last place he’d looked.  
  
He blamed Blake, personally. Like always. It had never steered him wrong before, so why change now?  
  
==========  
  
Chips, when baked, were surprisingly disappointing. They were delicious, don’t get him wrong, but there was just something _missing_ from the sea salt experience... Grease. Grease was definitely missing. Grease, and the artificial preservatives that rounded out the flavor and gave the snack it's pleasantly unhealthy aftertaste.  
  
Glynda had put her foot down on that though. Outright. With Kali backing her up, the traitor...keeping him to a diet his perfectly average and not at all pasty butt. Jaune had seen Kali around the house before, forearm deep in the bottom of a bag that hadn’t been anywhere close to that empty on the last sight.  
  
Blake being almost always nearby, her hands at her face as she choked down a double fistful of her own snack food while he got nothing, didn’t make that any better.  
  
“Good afternoon, Jaune. How are you?”  
  
Jaune, with his smuggled bag of chips under one arm along with an unopened comic book sleeve in the other, nearly hit the ceiling with a muffled scream as he found himself blindsided… No. Too tame for words. _Ambushed_ by a blandly smiling Kali, her hair tied back and sleeves pulled up to her elbows; duster in hand and in use as she poked at the corner of a particularly new-seeming, decorative mini dresser.  
  
It was...functional? That was the best that could be said about it. Couldn’t have been older than a year if it was a day.  
  
“You didn’t call out when you returned. Not even a hello so that I could welcome you back. How rude. One could think that you were trying to avoid someone.” Her head tilted questioningly as her amber eyes, slowly, slid down to what he had under his arms, even as he pulled them close to his chest and set his stance. His chips. _His_. “How is Blake supposed to learn anything if you don’t set a good example of normal human behavior, I wonder?”  
  
Jaune stared at her for a short moment as he shuffled his illicit goods higher up his torso. “Isn’t that your job?” He then pointed out in what he thought was a very reasonable manner with a very reasonable question. “You’re her senior! You’re, like, a hundred years older than me and I’m always doing homework! Why are you putting this on me!?”  
  
Whether she was serious or not, he had no idea...but he would act as if she was until he knew. No need to agree to something as a joke that would come around and bite him later on after all. An entire life standing alone against the united front of his sisters had taught him better.  
  
“But I’m not human,” Kali pointed out just as reasonably as he had. “And you’re right. I have a hundred years more _experience_ over you.” She faked a swoon, the movements artificially stiff. “More than enough to make me outdated; an ancient model of war, a relic of a near-forgotten age—”  
  
“You’re not that old…” Jaune, feeling sort of bad about what he’d just said but nowhere near enough to stick around, assured the woman as he sidled ever closer to his room. “I didn’t mean it like-”  
  
“—that knows nothing about even basic math or what the trends are for the modern day. Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said? Seen the things I’ve done, so ‘uncool’?” She came back to herself, standing perfectly straight and balanced as Jaune let out an offended squawk. “Blake needs the - _human _\- touch. Interaction outside of myself if you expect her to settle down anytime soon.” She turned her back, not as a form of dismissal as her upheld finger attested, but to dust a nearby painting into ultra-clean submission. “You really should know better, Jaune.”  
  
He winced. Cringed, rather, as he scratched the back of his head and forced himself to admit that, well...Kali had a point. Blake _did_ need to be taught the basics of social interaction...but it was just so _hard_. Ever since the explosion, and the weirdness with Weiss, he’d been leaving Blake at home more often than not in fear of what she might do in one of her more destructive whimsical fits.  
  
It wasn’t as if Jaune had been ignoring her or anything. Of course not. There had just been some...speed bumps he’d been having problems with is all... Life was hard, alright? Teaching a new someone how to live like a normal person hadn’t exactly been on his calendar.  
  
“But, I suppose that you are young. Your priorities may differ from mine on this point,” Kali acknowledged. “There are several social events coming up in the next few months, hosted by the school, I believe. Looking for a partner to accompany you to these events, while keeping up with your schoolwork, may be taking up your time.”  
  
If Jaune had been eating anything right then, he’d have choked on it. He’d have had a fatal accident, right then and there. ‘Thankfully’ though, all he had to drown himself with right then was air. He’d get to live another day, it seemed. Shame. “I - uh… Kind of need to go and-” Wallow in his loneliness. “Do things.”  
  
“Ah. Of course. You have things to do, people to talk to. Don’t mind me.” Kali gave him a nod from over her shoulder, coming to a conclusion that Jaune had no inkling of and no real desire to know. “Just don’t forget to charge your scroll before you turn in for the night.”  
  
“... Alright.” Now, he was _sure _that he didn’t want to know what she was thinking. “I can do that. Thank you.”  
  
“Always a pleasure.” She tittered and got back to cleaning as he scurried away towards his room like he’d just been shot and he was off to the doctor.  
  
Down the hall, take a left. Avoid bumping your hip on the corner lamp. One more left and there he was. Safety, quiet, privacy… Wait. No. No privacy. Of course, there was no privacy.  
  
Jaune stared, stupefied, _horrified_; as Blake slid out from under his bed. Kicked her way out with a bottle of soda held lengthwise between her lips and tail flagged high...oh, Brothers, _why_?  
  
“Are you raiding my stash?” Jaune asked dumbly. A safe question to ask as the reason as to why he could see Blake’s tail was...not so much. “Why would you do that? Get your own!”  
  
Blake took her time in answering; a shake of the head to get the hair out of her face. The process of her standing up took what felt like, to him, an absolute eternity as his eyes, without his input, followed the end of her twitching tail down to its base just above Blake’s finely toned rear. The curve of her bared hips to either side so close to human that there was effectively no difference that could be seen…as she spit the bottle into her hands and decided that then was the right moment to give him the time of day. “Oh. You’re home. Hello.”  
  
“That wasn’t an answer...” Jaune trailed off for a second, now totally unable to ignore what was in front of him any longer. He was an unattached, single teenage boy, damn it. Even if you were trying to be entirely objective, Blake was _hot_ and, well… “Why are you naked?”  
  
Well… That. She was that...being naked was pretty much the only time _anyone _ever saw a Faunus’s tail if they had one. He’d never seen one himself, until today...and he was currently busily cursing that fact as once he got a look at her, her nipples looked like they could cut glass; a pair of dark, puckered points on her generously sized chest that he found himself having a hard time looking away from with any real success.  
  
He’d been missing out, hadn’t he?  
  
“Why not?” With a quick flick of her thumb, the aluminum cap on her pilfered drink went flying into the corner and went...somewhere. Somewhere around the general area of his wastebasket, he believed… He was finding it hard to think at the moment. “It was only Kali and I until you came back. She doesn’t mind.”  
  
“I-I do!” Jaune stuttered and made to turn his head when she did a little stretch. That his head would only go so far before biological limits came into play, leaving him with a good half of the action anyway...damn. It was like there were _cables _under her skin, a play of muscles that he’d never had to think about until now… He might have just got himself a new fetish. Shit. Kali had been right. He _did_ need to do something...anything, before Blake did something that he couldn’t fix. “Get some clothes on!”  
  
Blake took a sip of her drink. Sighed. “... Fine. Whatever you want.” A slow blink and another sip, followed by an eye-catching shrug that threw him off of whatever track he was on when her breasts bounced and she made to walk around him. “You’ll see me at dinner.”  
  
Jaune, stock-still as he waited for her to leave. Ignored the brush of her tail as it trailed the line of his arm from wrist to elbow even as it sent a shiver down his spine. He only relaxed when the door closed, the painful loosening in his shoulders (and the burning in his very dry eyes) making him hiss rude things to himself. Nothing loud enough for anyone to hear, even the Faunus that shared the house with him, but loud enough to make him feel better. Somewhat.  
  
All he’d wanted to do was relax, but no. He was going to be thinking about this for the rest of the week, at the least… His bunk was going to be seeing a lot of use.  
  
Falling face first onto his bed, his cargo thrown to the side, he let out a low and tortured groan. Not because his life had suddenly become a lot more - complicated or anything, even if that was a big part of it… But because Kali had brought something up. Something that he’d been spending a great deal of time trying not to think about.  
  
The only person he knew in any meaningful way was a fifteen-year-old girl that he could only think of as, at best, a very good friend. Everyone else he’d ever met was so far out of his league it wasn’t even _funny._ What the _hell_ was he going to do?  
  
==========  
  
The short shake of the head that the younger Faunus sent Kali’s way as they passed each other in the hallway was noted. Mulled over. Considered. Things weren’t going according to plan. They’d have to proceed to the next, subtlety thrown out the window entirely. Not unexpected.  
  
He was just like his grandfather...


	5. Chapter 5

“Whhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy...” Jaune groaned to himself as all but crawled through the door of his room. It was long, drawn out, and painful, just like the torture he’d just gone through that very day...but, really, more of a slow and slightly drippy plod...it had been raining. Today wasn’t the best day. “_Whyyyyy.”_  
  
He had gotten his wish. His prayers had been answered by the most jackass of genies. There had been a lot less math this week, complex or otherwise, just like he’d wanted. Almost none, actually, beyond the very basics of what was needed to go through his day-to-day. No more having to calculate specific ballistic yields in the face of an unending horde and how to stretch munitions while cutting his monetary losses as required.  
  
One would think that would be hard enough on him...but no. Oh no. There was no math this week. None...so it had to make up for the lack in some way.  
  
This week, he got to decide who lived and who died. Literally...or as close as before they were legitimately faced with that choice themselves.  
  
They were covering medical procurements and utilities now. Chemicals, powders, extractions. The most used and needed of such as well as the very few specialty drugs required for very special circumstances (Deathstalker Venom was no joke)... Then there was the nitty-gritty. The meat of the work.  
  
Casualties, triage tagging, and how to use black tagged patients to lure off Grimm so that the rest could escape. Delightful.  
  
Jaune actually felt his Aura being drained with each new piece of information being divulged. Each data point was an attack directly at the core of himself, his _soul_, or so it felt… How had people, humanity in its entirety, been able to keep existing when this was what it had to deal with every day?  
  
His mind. It was boggled.  
  
“Jaune,” Kali said at the side and back of him, her voice oddly high and strained to his ears...he must have been more tired than he’d thought. “You’re dragging mud all over the floor, you dirty boy~”  
  
… Yes… Definitely more tired than he’d thought.  
  
“... Pretty sure that’s just what’s left of my innocence, Kali,” Jaune replied softly, the energy required to look over at her direction currently beyond him. Any and all that he had left was spent in just trying to take off his shoes.  
  
After stumbling three times Jaune figured he wasn’t getting them off. Giving up at that point was easy. With his tie, not so much. If he didn’t get that off before he took a nap, he’d probably never wake up at all.  
  
That might have sounded like a very silly worry but, considering…  
  
“I’ll be in my room for a while today. It's been a long day. Sorry about the mess.” He waved her off as politely as he could while focusing on not tripping over anything he could possibly trip over. If he did, that would be it for the day. He wouldn’t be getting up as the weight of cold, clinical statistics crushed him underfoot. “I’ll be around for dinner though. Don’t worry about me.”  
  
Jaune knew that he was going to regret it later, judging from the cold silence that had taken up all the sound in the house... But he would deal with that when he had enough energy to lift his head. One problem at a time.  
  
============  
  
Jaune, in waking up from his nap, came to consciousness slowly. That he didn’t particularly want to get up at all wasn’t helping. He was still tired, still deep enough in that space between sleep and waking that he wanted to do nothing more than to roll back over and get back to it...if his body would only let him.  
  
Like most things in his life though, the things he really wanted were just out of reach.  
  
He tossed and turned in his bed a few times, trying to find that one magic spot where he could drift back to sleep. Not finding it after a few fruitless minutes he found himself forced to open his eyes, emotional and physical exhaustion making them as heavy as the weight of his own sins and personal mistakes.  
  
He really should have hidden those transcripts better...and, after a quick but blurry peer around the room, he could not see any obvious reason for why he was having such a hard time with sleeping.  
  
No horrible Grimm waiting to maul him. No lurking prowler waiting for a chance to kidnap him. No horrid textbook or brightly smiling educator to further defile his innocence and belief in the good of man. Nothing. Nothing at all.  
  
Jaune flopped his head back down onto his pillow with a frustrated grunt.  
  
He just wanted to rest...but he guessed that wasn’t in the cards anymore… Ah, well. It was probably time for dinner anyway. Or close enough for bingo’s sake. Wallowing in his own brand of pity for much longer than he already had could wait for another time. Dinner waited for no one...dessert either, for that matter.  
  
Having found his reason for living in one of Kali’s varied desserts, Jaune slung his legs out of his bed. Took a stand...and realized that the room was a lot draftier than he could remember it being.  
  
A downwards look at himself had him jumping back into his bed with an incomprehensible sound that, at the end of the day, was a question. A request for answers from no one in particular that he expected no real reply to.  
  
That question was where, in the name of the Brothers, had all his clothes gone?  
  
“I see that you are finally awake, Master Arc. Welcome back to the waking world. Dinner will be done soon, if you were wondering.” Kali appeared from _somewhere _(what might as well have been thin air to him for all the difference it made) in an outfit that had him rapidly blinking the blur out of his eyes through pure befuddlement; so fast that he could _hear_ them clicking even as nothing changed. “Of course, I could run a hot bath for you instead, if you wish, to ward off the remainder of today’s chill.”  
  
Jaune, blankets pulled up to his chin and eyes as wide as dinner plates, found himself unable to reply to anything that she’d just said in a meaningful manner. That he’d heard any of it at all could be considered a small miracle; the content, the basic idea of her words, was already fading from his memory.  
  
There just wasn’t any room for them in his head. The sight he was currently taking in was pushing out all the unimportant stuff. Stuff like words. Worries. Critical thinking… Breathing like a normal human being. It was all very normal.  
  
He was a teenage boy, after all. Pushing him over the edge into this state was as easy as there being a particularly stiff breeze that day. This was a _little _more than a stiff breeze.  
  
“Are you alright, Master? You look pale. Was I too late with my offer?” Kali bent forward even further than she already had with that gesture of concern, a gesture that had Jaune’s eyes just about popping out of his head as her breasts threatened to spill out of her top. The hand that she extended towards his face, assumedly to check his temperature, quickly turned that threat into what could only be taken as a promise of intent… The world was a cold, cruel place to tease him so. “It would be just my luck if you’d already fallen ill.”  
  
He must have. Real life, last time he’d checked, hadn’t had a Kali wearing a maid costume in it. A _fetishized_ maid costume at that. Her normal outfit might have shown a little - thigh - at times, but this was… She was wearing fishnet stockings, so tight on her that the thick flesh of said thighs looked like they were fighting to escape through the gaps_._ The skirt she was wearing was so short, the only thing keeping her from flashing him something that would have tipped him right over the edge and into madness (especially with what had happened earlier with Blake) was the infuriatingly thick layer of ruffles under them.  
  
Basically, _Kali _was currently his every wet dream made real...or the centerpiece of a Mistralian porn magazine, if he wanted to be specific. His papers hadn’t been the only thing he’d lost in the purge, and he had no idea how to feel about that.  
  
… Jaune had to be sick. Really sick, if he was hallucinating as badly as this… Funnily enough, right now, the thought that he might have been straddling the line of life and death was almost comforting. It was an explanation and, when everything else failed, that was sometimes the only thing you needed to see another day.  
  
The fear of the unknown was the great enemy. He’d learned that in class. Once he could recognize the phenomenon involved in this problem for what it was, that was proving itself to be surprisingly useful and relevant.  
  
Professor Peach, while being a complete and utter terror and giver of nightmares in bite-sized form, was a professor for a reason. He saw that now...and, now, he could only hope that whatever cautionary tale he became in her class if he bit it wasn’t made out to be utterly pathetic.  
  
Kali frowned lightly as the back of her hand brushed against his cheek. Jaune, having come to terms with the dichotomy, the difference of lies and truth that his existence had become, didn’t shy away as the elder Faunus’s chest just about took up the entirety of his vision. Neither did he twitch when she placed a hand on his knee for balance.  
  
He hadn’t had any porn in _months_. The closest example of such that had been at his disposal lately was Ruby’s sister (what was she _eating_?) and his quickly fading imagination. If his brain was so willing to work overtime to make up for the painful lack of such material in his dying moments, who was he to complain? He’d take this over a play-by-play of his life any day…that wouldn’t have been half as interesting. Not even a fifth. He could admit it.  
  
Jaune’s life hadn’t been all that interesting so far. The lack of running battles and saved damsels in it so far was a heavy indicator of such. Shocker.  
  
“Oh my… You’re burning up.” Kali’s hand went from his cheek to his forehead, the contact with the back of her cool, soft hand and his heated features kept up for the entire way there; goosebumps all the way down. “You should have brought your umbrella, young man. You knew very well that it was going to rain before you left,“ She said with a doleful expression as, before he’d even realized it, she’d pushed him down into his pillow with a palm on his chest. “I dearly hope that you haven’t caught anything that won’t work itself out over the weekend.”  
  
“M-me too,” Jaune stuttered out in agreement as he watched Kali take a stand, a momentary flash of inner thigh under her skirt more than enough to hold his attention for the foreseeable future if nothing else had. “That would be the absolute worst.”  
  
“Wouldn’t it, Master?” Kali agreed as she casually adjusted her slightly askew skirt with several pats, much to Jaune’s sorrow. The sway of her breasts as she did this was quick to take the sting out though...if she was even wearing a bra, it was the closest thing to non-existent that he could imagine existing. “With your schedule as it is, any time spent convalescing in bed would be a terrible waste… One moment.” With a nod and a twirl that had her skirt flaring out and away from her body as she made to his desk, Jaune’s ‘dream’ theory found itself cemented upon a foundation of steel.  
  
Kali hadn’t been wearing panties. He hadn’t exactly seen her front, but the view from the back of an utterly bare, firm, well-muscled rear (the pair of four-inch pumps on her feet definitely hadn’t hurt) had been all that had been necessary to verify this particular claim of partial nudity.  
  
… Jaune’s fevered brain was working overtime today. He’d never known he’d had it in him. Go him.  
  
It didn’t take long for Kali to return to his side, no time at all. With a silver platter in hand, it's top firmly placed as she put it down on his bedside table, and lifted up the lid with a roll of the wrist to add some flair; a small hill of foil wrapped packages laid within. Most likely medications to put him at ease, the plate there for extra dramatics to help relax as the darkness closed in.  
  
That was the only conclusion that could be reasonably reached. Jaune began to sit up, not nearly so weak as to be unable to feed himself, only for a gentle hand to push him right back down once again.  
  
“Now, Master. Please. Don’t stress yourself,” Kali whispered, her fingers digging into the duvet as she just about _crawled _on top of him. “Let me take care of all your needs.”  
  
He suddenly felt more alive now. Much. Hard not to when Kali was attempting to mold her body against his and he had lost most of his upper arm in her cleavage; the connotations involved as she wet her lips with the end of her tongue and looked down on him with half-lidded, glowing eyes.  
  
His dick, which had been completely unable to decide whether it wanted to be hard or not up to this point, found itself ramped right up to ‘diamonds’ in an instant. That wasn’t going to change anytime soon either. He didn’t need to be able to see the future to know that much.  
  
… All that he’d needed to go on was a pair of breasts and a warm body, real or not… Did that make him pathetic, or did that make him a man? Who could say? Some of the things that he’d seen several of the compound workers get up to in the name of finding company made him think.  
  
A hand on his crotch, cupping his erection full on and giving it a squeeze through the sheets put a stop to any thoughts of the male condition real quick.  
  
“Oh, my… I was checking for wounds and signs of illness but - _this_?” Kali gasped and, with another gentle palpation of his length that made him groan, she pulled away. “How did this happen?”  
  
… Did he really have to explain this…? Also, what the fu-  
  
“You poor thing.” Like magic, his sheets disappeared, thrown over Kali’s shoulder and to the floor so that she could - _examine_ \- him. Closely. So close that her hair as it fell over her face was more than enough to hide the tip of his member...and feel the warm wash of her breath. “You must be in so much _pain_.”  
  
Jaune gasped and threw his head back when Kali brought her head forward that final inch, the soft feeling of her lips on the tip a shock that he would never forget for as long as he lived.  
  
The feeling was indescribable. His limited experience made it so, leaving him with little more than purple prose and weak comparisons to make do. Crushed velvet. Moist silk. The understanding of what it meant to be soft-serve ice cream during a walkabout on a warm summer’s day… None of it very good, but he wasn’t trying for _good_.  
  
Jaune couldn’t see it, but he could _feel _her tongue swirl over and around the head, slow and methodical as she tasted him. Lavished her attention on the very first inch and nothing more for an effective eternity before, with a light suck that had him thrusting his hips towards her, she pulled away. Easily avoided his unthinking attempt to force himself deeper into her face with casual ease and a hand to brush back some hair behind her ear; the corner of her eye on him as the strand of saliva that bridged her mouth and his cock snapped without a sound.  
  
He’d just been blindsided with a blowjob by a very attractive, if not at all human, woman. The first he could ever remember receiving, dreamland or not. Better descriptions - poetry - could be done by men with more experience than he...and he was starting to think that maybe, just maybe, he wasn’t dreaming. That he wasn’t dying.  
  
Juane had an imagination, a strong one, but not so strong that he could pull something like this together, feelings and sounds and all. His capacity for self-deception could only go so far before he risked a future of padded rooms and nice men in white coats… The blonde might have walked a finer line than was healthy, but he knew where all his stuff was. Living in fantasy was fun and all, but…  
  
“It's worse than I thought.” A flash of pink muscle; hot air flickering out from between her teeth caused Jaune’s erection to throb and twitch, entirely uncommented on outside of the slightest upturn to the female’s professional smile. “I wonder how much I’ll have to extract before it finally goes down?” Kali mused to herself, the ‘extract’ she was talking about utterly transparent when referred to in its current context. “Two? Three? … More?” Her long, smooth fingers curled around at the base of his shaft in punctuation to this, unmoving but painfully pleasant even then. “My master is a young man...and young men can be so _stubborn_.”  
  
… Reality had its perks. Most definitely.   
  
Leaning down once more, with her mouth opened far enough to show the bright white points of her teeth, she took him in. Made a show of it by pressing her tongue firmly into the underside of his erection; putting him in the pleasant middle that was the roof of her mouth and hot, dexterous muscle as she lowered herself further yet. On and on, the glans long past gone as she swallowed Jaune’s length with what was, to him, shocking ease. There one moment, more than half gone the next, all before she’d even closed her mouth.  
  
Jaune had to admit, with a sort of dazed clarity, that he was watching one _hell _of a magic trick being done… And all before her nose bumped up against his pelvis to rest against the thin, blonde thatching of his hair. Every inch before had been a new level of pleasure, a series of shocks going straight from his crotch to his brain. This though? There could be nothing better... or so he thought between rapid eye blink one through six.  
  
On eye blink six, he was proven wrong (something he was just going to have to get used to, it seemed) when she started to _suck_.  
  
Suddenly holding his eyes open became a chore. The previous heights of pleasure he’d attained, their records, were shattered before this new reality like so much glass and the unrealistic expectations of a near-total virgin… She wasn’t drawing on him all that hard. More like she was nursing than pulling at him as if he were a straw...but that didn’t matter. The black and white spotting, popping off at the corner of his vision; the sensation that was your entire _being_ making its escape to greener pastures. He’d gone from zero to a hundred faster than he could take a breath and, suddenly, his sheets were no longer near a good enough anchor to life and reality.  
  
Kali, still and thinking, somehow became yet more _still _as she found Jaune’s hands in her hair. His fingers at the base of her ears, catching them in an undeniable, but undoubtedly gentle, grip.  
  
… They were _soft_. He’d never thought of that before. Realized it, yes. Understood, yes… It was obvious that that was the case; she wasn’t made of wire and steel wool. He’d just never been able to pull up the courage to try anything like this before. They were soft, but stiff at the same time. Flexible was the word. Yielding when required under the soft press from the pads of his digits before snapping back into place. A stiff structure, yet plastic, yielding under his fingers before snapping back into position with his every manipulation.   
  
Instinctively, his fingers massaged these particular features, eliciting another reaction from Kali other than stunned paralysis.  
  
She purred. Loudly...and he didn’t mind it. No. He didn’t mind it at all as her expression of contentment rumbled up from her chest and right into his shaft, adding an entirely new layer of perversity to an already lewd act. Yet another facet of sex that he’d never heard of, his Mistralian magazines having never brought it up at all... Between the soft ears, the purring, and the gradually strengthening suction around his cock as she lifted herself off of him, he could feel himself losing control. Too many sensations. Too many points of assault, several of which that were hitting buttons that he’d never known he’d had, resulted in the inevitable.  
  
That it had taken him as long as it had was a new point of pride for him.  
  
As his ability to hold back to growing pressure finally reached its limit, his awareness sharpened to a point. Toes clenching, breath hitching, leaving the entirety of his attention focused on the point where he and Kali were joined...and the amused narrowing of her eyes, just before the first pulse struck against the back of her throat.  
  
That narrowing of those orbs vanished entirely then, exchanged for a surprised jolt and a hilarious, dark-eyed widening that Jaune had never seen on Kali’s face before. It didn’t change from that either. Her lips tightening around his base, and the sucking down of his load, accompanied by that expression made his heart skip a beat.  
  
He could feel his length twitching as she gulped, her throat working around him to drain him of every drop of his seed. With that awareness came a light weariness, muscles stiff yet warm. A weakness starting in his fingers, in the hands he was using to hold onto Kali’s ears as if they were a set of handlebars and keep her down on his lap so that she could keep doing what she was doing.   
  
It took him a while to come to the conclusion that, human or not, she might have needed to breathe. When he released her, there was a crack. The pop of his knuckles getting some relief of their own, followed by miniscule sparks of white to ease the ache while Kali took the chance to back away.  
  
Aura was something else...and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt like this. So...relaxed, he supposed the word was. Almost puddley, like he could just sit back and melt in his own skin… He felt… _wow_.  
  
Words. What even were they?  
  
“I...uhm…” Jaune, as words came to him, coughed and flexed his hands. Flexed, not wrung. An important distinction while he shook off the afterglow as best as he was able and get what he wanted to say across. He didn’t exactly regret what he’d done or anything, but how he’d gone about it... “I didn’t - mean to do that. I mean-” His apology fell flat, flatter, when he forced himself to look up.  
  
It was hard to be sincere when you found that, at some point, the person you were apologizing to was touching themselves. Whatever he’d expected to see, that hadn’t been it. Not even close.  
  
At some point, Kali’s hands had moved from his thighs to herself, to her clothing. The top half of her maid outfit had been loosened until it couldn’t hold on, leaving it sitting around her hips and her breasts free; One hand was on her breast. Thumb and forefinger, rolling the dark and puckered point of a nipple between them. The other hand, beneath her skirt.  
  
He couldn’t look away. Couldn’t keep himself from listening to the slow movements of her fingers and the quietly loud sound of disturbed wetness... The pleasured set of her features, eyes at a relaxed close even as her ears flicked sporadically from forward to back in agitation.  
  
If she’d minded what he’d done, she wasn’t acting like it.  
  
Letting his breathing even out, he forced himself to sit up for a better view; Kali masturbating away at the side of his bed with not a care in the world or concern about his presence… Minutes passed and, as they did, Kali seemed to get - frustrated - with herself somehow. Temporarily frantic, a short spat of massaging turned into a mauling of her breasts and a furious circling of the limb between her legs.  
  
Temporary being the keyword, it ended quickly. Less than thirty seconds before her lips shifted into a moue of displeasure and she ground to a halt.  
  
One eye cracked open, amber quickly being pushed out to the very edges as a tide of black visibly expanded outward. That same eye, unblinking, then narrowed, turning into a thin and inhuman slit right down the middle as she gave him the sort of look a predator would a piece of meat.  
  
Considering where her eye had landed, and refused to move from, that wasn’t_ wrong_ by a certain value of _wrong_.  
  
Glancing down at himself, he realized that he was hard again, if he’d even gone down at all. Heck, it looked like it might have been _harder_ somehow… Then he glanced back up.  
  
Kali licked her lips, her tongue darting out to catch the sweat on her upper lip with a groan. “You are just _insatiable_.” Her skirt rustled as the hand under it made its return to open air; wet enough for light to reflect off of as it came to her mouth and she got herself a shameless taste of her own fluids. “I shouldn’t have expected anything less from you.” Her hands moved in concert to pull at several ties at the side of her dress, removing the last hold the garment still had on her that wasn’t gravity and the perversity of the universe. “My master couldn’t be anything less.”  
  
Falling onto her hands, she draped herself over his lower half. Laid him out across his own bed yet again then further yet until he couldn’t see her at all. Just the dull-white ceiling instead of the glorious sight that was Kali on her knees, just before her skirt fell off of her hips… He could feel her though. Oh _boy, _could he feel her.  
  
Once again, he was balls deep in her mouth. Once again, she started to blow him; sucking, teasing and pausing like clockwork to coax out a second load. This time though, rather than contenting herself with the least possible effort that she could give without doing nothing at all, she _moved._  
  
He didn’t need to see her for this. What he was feeling, even if it was just her hair on his thigh, and the shifting of her breasts on his legs was more than enough for him to tell exactly what was happening.  
  
She was bobbing up and down on him, from tip to base while letting out guttural moans and groans of enjoyment that were nearly as good as her purring… Nearly. Without access to her ears, he was going to have to be satisfied with this much...and in keeping her from overwhelming him as she had done on the first go round.  
  
He planned on stretching this out for as long as he could, however he could. Who knew when a time like this would come around again? … This was going to be hard.  
  
Closing his eyes, he tried to focus on the sensations, rather than pairing this experience with the mispatterned look of patched stucco. With the push and pull of her breasts against his balls; forward and back, rocking him while she worked the length in her mouth over like a woman possessed… Then came the abrupt stop. The loud, long _slurp _of her lips dragging over his flesh more than enough for him to give a go at grabbing her again, of forcibly stopping her teasing by whatever means necessary.  
  
Whatever he could have grabbed, might have grabbed, was moot as she pulled away from his dick when he got close. A plaintive whimper, mixed with a growl escaped him as his suspicion that she’d been teasing him up to this point all along, just about neared their crescendo.  
  
Later, he’d be ashamed that he ever thought anything of the sort when, instead of leaving him as he was, she got onto her knees...and then on top of him. One hand next to his head to keep her braced as she straddled either side of his hips and came up to meet him, face-to-face.  
  
Raven hair fluttered down to settle around her shoulders and face in silky cascade, her eyes not quite meeting his as she reached down. Grabbed him by the shaft and just under the head to angle him towards her pussy without a word between them.  
  
Jaune could instantly feel the exact moment she had him lined up, nestling his tip against the sweltering, moist heat of her entrance...The vague thought, more instinct, that he should thrust his hips upward to start with passed through as more than a flight of fancy. An act that he was a breath away from going for when instead, Kali’s hand slid around to the base of his skull to grab at a handful of blond hair.  
  
In that same instant, she lowered herself until her pelvis met Jaune’s to engulf his dick entirely; his field of vision replaced by an entirely new world when she pulled his head deep into the valley that was the pale softness of her breasts and began to _rock_. Another forward and back motion, one that was almost soothing as the smooth flesh of her tits dragged against his face with every bounce on his lap.  
  
At some point in this, Jaune couldn’t remember when he stopped laying there and started _doing_. Running his hands over Kali’s body; the slope of her back, her hips, her bottom and thighs. Wherever he could reach without thought or reason, no matter what as he forced himself to meet her in the middle with some thrusts of his own and make several moves to catch a mouthful of breast.  
  
He wasn’t entirely sure if this was what he was supposed to be doing, but instinct demanded it...and it wasn’t as if Kali was complaining, judging by the cooing.  
  
Sloppy and somewhat ill-timed as he might have been as he fucked up against the Faunus in his bed, he was not so vapid that he couldn’t feel Kali speeding up, working herself towards some endpoint that he wasn’t entirely involved with. Having just cum twice, he felt as though he could go for a good long while. A small part of his mind, drowned somewhere in all that dopamine, told him that _every_ guy at some point had probably thought the same thing.  
  
… A much stronger part of his brain asked how many of those people had consensual sex with catgirl Faunus MILF maids.  
  
With that question, she slammed her hips down just as he was coming up, prompting a keening wail to escape her previously quiet body as shudders began to wrack her frame. Both of her arms pulled him close as the slick muscles wrapped around his cock came around to squeeze and pull at him with a milking vise grip… Proving him wrong once again as the entirety of his stamina instantly vanished into the ether and he found himself emptying his balls into her one last time.  
  
Jaune could feel it travel up his length, white-hot and hard as it fired out into Kali’s insides... Whatever was going on, on Kali’s end apparently was good, because this, if anything, strengthened her already hysterical reaction to another level. With another scream. A cry, higher than the last and a seizing of what, through his body, felt like every muscle in hers...and, then, a loosening. A literal release that had him falling over and sucking in air, suddenly exhausted.  
  
When he closed his eyes next, he was asleep before he could even open them again.  
  
==========  
  
After a few long minutes, Kali moved off with Jaune with a shiver as she was left empty. Satisfied grin on her face nevertheless, she glanced down at Jaune, only to cock her head in confusion.  
  
He’d fallen asleep again… Honestly, sometimes that’s all he seemed to do, efforts notwithstanding... At least it had been enough to get his erection to go down. There was that.  
  
Kali nodded to herself and, with a glance at the bedside table and the pile of condoms lying there, she paused. Shook her head. Felt a - _disturbing_ \- amount of heat rush up into her cheeks as she realized she’d forgotten something very important.  
  
She was _supposed_ to have shown him how to use a condom as a part of this confidence boosting exercise. A necessary skill for a healthy, stress-free life... His technique needed work as well. That he’d satisfied her even with them as they were was impressive, but not nearly enough. They’d have to do this more and more often to get him up to shape...if only she could keep herself on task.  
  
That she’d lost herself in the moment was...embarrassing.  
  
How in the _world _was she going to teach him good habits with a work ethic like that? It might have been fine to go without when it was her...but with human girls? That was an entirely different thing in its scope.  
  
A ceiling tile above her head shifted back into place with a whisper.  
  
Ah, well… Hopefully Blake had learned something from this, if anyone had.  
  
Kali stood up, her legs trembling as she gathered her clothing and enjoyed the tell-tale ache that came from a good encounter… the first of such that she’d felt in over fifty years. Absence does make the heart grow fonder, she assumed.  
  
It was one of the few things that humans got right. How fun.


	6. Chapter 6

Coffee on a Saturday morning was one of Glynda’s few vices.  
  
It wasn’t much of one. Not in her opinion. It was the sort of thing that was more than expected for her in the position she was in, as the Deputy Headmistress of the most prestigious school for Hunting (and higher education) on all of Remnant...but it was a vice.  
  
That it was pretty much everywhere, and most of the staff were completely unable to function without a hot cup of the tarry substance (Bart came to mind), made it easy to indulge. Cheap as well. Her position in the school’s hierarchy, and the hard work she’d put into forging her reputation, often allowed her the pick of the pot.  
  
Glynda took a long, slow sip of _her_ burning bean juice. As black as a Grimm’s lack of a soul and three times as bitter, with just a _touch _of cinnamon. Joy. Wakefulness. Liquid wonder at only fifty dollars a pound, straight from the cafeteria safe and right off the top of a freshly opened bag.  
  
It wasn’t an abuse of power. It was only her just due. Any and all charges of tyranny leveled at her was nothing more than slander. Slander that was easily retracted as soon as the entirely legitimate paperwork that she’d been doing in a certain someone’s stead ended up on the right desk.  
  
Tyranny. Hah. They didn’t know the meaning of the word. If they wanted _tyranny_, she’d let them handle CRDL for a week. Having to keep an eye on them so that they wouldn’t get their hands on a fistful of wall candy was a fulltime job.  
  
… That might have been somewhat unfair. They were infuriating, yes, but she’d dealt with worse teams in her time as an educator. They were - challenged, some less than others. Their leader (what Ozpin had been thinking putting him in charge, she had no clue) was a thug at best...and she didn’t really have much better to say about him.  
  
That Miss Adel hadn’t been willing to press charges when he’d…’molested’, the girl’s Faunus had been the only thing saving him from some time in a cell. That Velvet had non-lethally expressed her displeasure upon his person, instead of rending him limb from limb in an orgy of gore, was yet another show of luck… That he’d tried _again_ and survived _again_ was a miracle.  
  
What was that saying about fools, children, and the perversity of the universe? It slipped her mind at the moment, but she felt that it applied… She’d been trying to relax. Glynda had forgotten.  
  
She took another sip, long and slow, then let out a relieved sigh.  
  
Nothing could shake her from this level of calm, of utter zen. Glynda had found her center, here in her bathrobe and slippers on this plush armchair with extendable footrest. They weren’t her problem. She had no problems.  
  
“Morning, Glynda,” Kali greeted as she thumped her way down the stairs. Not ‘calmly stepped’ down it like she normally would have from what little Glynda knew of her. _Thumped_. Put her feet down on each wooden platform with none of her customary grace in a boorish way that had Glynda’s hackles rising in minute amounts with every loud, slightly uneven thud. “Starting the morning off right, I see.”  
  
“Well enough, I suppose. It could always be better.” Glynda sighed, letting whatever frustration she might have been feeling go before she gave the Faunus a small smile… Her job was a stressful one. To say that her nerves and senses were finely tuned was an understatement. Overly tuned, some might say. The mindset required often followed her out of work and - and she supposed that might have been part of the reason as to why she was still single, besides the time her job already demanded of her. “But isn’t that always the case?”  
  
“It's a little early to break out the scotch, isn’t it?”  
  
Glynda snorted into her drink, the joke perfectly timed for keeping any and all boiling hot liquids out of her nose and in her mug; right after her last swallow and before the next. Even then, it took some work on her Semblance’s part to make sure nothing fell over the rim and onto her robe. “God, no. I’ve never been much of one for drinking and, even then, a strong glass of red before bed is as much as I’ll ever have.”  
  
As she’d said before, her vices were few. Beginning her day off with the excuse of, ‘it's five somewhere’, was not one of them. Even if that _was_ her sort of thing, the ever-looming specter that was possibly being called into work wouldn’t allow for it. Ozpin may have been a great man, and one of the best Hunters the world had ever known, but an administrator he was not… Not a very good one, in the ways that it mattered.  
  
He was eccentric, deeply so, and he knew every trick and scheme one could pull off with a pile of printer paper and a stamp like he knew the back of his hand. He could play paperwork like a fiddle. Better than a fiddle, actually, seeing as he was musically inclined as a particularly dull rock.  
  
He was absolutely tone deaf, and utterly convinced as to otherwise. That just made it all the worse.  
  
Anyway, the launching of students into the forest hadn’t been in the plans. Neither had they been a forgotten tradition, like he’d asserted and she’d been forced to play along with while in the presence of the students to keep a solid front. He’d just thought that doing so would be interesting, and good for a laugh when put up in the projector at that year’s Christmas party.  
  
… That it might very well be good for a laugh, much like he’d said, didn’t help. She’d had to hold back a chuckle more than once herself as she watched that year’s parade of errors come into being. From someone following their own footsteps around the forest while in search of a partner to accidental crossdressing, she’d seen quite a bit.  
  
Not all of his foibles, several of which were goaded on by Peter and Bart at their most incorrigible, were as harmless though...and that was where she came in. She was the voice of reason in a sea of middle-aged immaturity. The one that shut down whatever excessive tomfoolery that they’d decided to try and spend the budget on.  
  
Showing up absolutely shitfaced after he’d done something that needed her touch to keep it from exploding would make any peaceful and efficient resolutions to the problem...difficult.  
  
With a yawn, Glynda shook her head and dragged herself back to the sort of conversation she had going on. This was a Saturday. Her one day off. Nothing was her problem until they made it one, and may the Brothers help them if they did. “What time is it?”  
  
She had her scroll nearby, as always, but she didn’t _feel _like reaching for it at the moment. It just wasn’t in her. That was how you _knew _she was feeling good, really; the lack of urgency inherent in it said as much.  
  
“Seven or so. Closer to eight.” Kali, who had slunk into the kitchen during the quiet, called back. The sizzle that sounded after, the smell of bacon, and the sound of one of Jaune’s high-pitched yelps told Glynda all she needed to know about the Faunus’ plans for the morning…and Jaune’s. Hers as well, hopefully. Glynda didn’t like to impose, but it had been a _very _long time since she’d had home cooking, in her own home or otherwise. The particular change in recent days was a - pleasant one, problems and all. “Breakfast will be out soon if that was your question.”  
  
Refusing to say one way or the other as to what her next words might have been (they were exactly what Kali had thought), Glynda shut down that conversation in order to prepare for the next. A conversation that she was hoping, beyond all reason, could be done as if it was between two mature adults.  
  
Seeing as she’d been ‘preparing’ for that talk for a couple of months now without getting anywhere, and how Jaune was, well, not an adult… That was a difficult proposition to consider. Clearly. In all honesty, she didn’t really expect that she’d be getting anywhere that day either. Not without some practice that didn’t involve staring into a mirror and mouthing seeming nonsense at herself.  
  
She was twenty-eight years old. Not eighteen. She should be better than this.  
  
Glynda sighed and loosened her hold on her mug before she ended up doing something that she’d regret. Cracking it came to mind; possible marriage with someone you barely knew and was a decade your junior was just that hard of a concept for her to handle, as it should be.  
  
That wasn’t exactly a common issue. Not for someone of her status. _Especially _not for someone fo her status. Being a teacher of the Hunting arts, even if a rather good one, was not quite the same thing as strengthening a dynasty.  
  
When Kali came back, this time with a few strips of bacon on a napkin and another in her mouth, as was the usual whenever Jaune cooked, Glynda gestured to the seat next to hers. Just the once before Kali zeroed in on the movement in that way most feline Faunus had, her figurative tail lashing about in excitement for less than a second before she found her center and made to take that offered seat.  
  
Faunus had their tells and, it seemed, no matter their age, they were always there. If Glynda had pulled out a fresh salmon instead, she had little doubt as to how that would go. It would be like watching a school of piranha on the attack, if the piranha knew how to use a knife and fork to deadly effect.  
  
Glynda started, “Kali.”  
  
Kali responded with a nod, “Glynda.”  
  
“Has he been told about…” Glynda gestured with her left hand, her ring finger out and doing a little circle. A more obvious lead to the conversation without her saying it loud, Glynda could not conceive. “Or have any inkling as to the reason he’s here instead of in the dorms?”  
  
“No.” Kali, with a small smile on her face, shook her head. “He does not. We’d have known if he did. Jaune is many things, but quiet is not one of them.”  
  
“That is true.” Glynda didn’t see him that often, as much as she should as his guardian, but she’d noticed that much. He had no problems when it came to talking, even when he probably should have… Not all that different from the average male his age, she supposed. Anything to get a pretty girl to smile. “I would have thought that his parents would have sprung the news on him by now.”  
  
“We’ve talked about this before, I believe. Or something like.” Kali popped another rasher of bacon into her mouth with a hum...and it was true. They had. About a month ago, Glynda believed. It had been as helpful to her as this talk had been so far...which was to say, not much. “The Arc family isn’t going to push him on you. If you think you can make a match, that you can live with him, that would be wonderful. Otherwise…” She shrugged. “No point in giving him expectations as to something that might not happen.”  
  
Glynda wet her lips with the point of her tongue, feeling uncomfortable as she raised her coffee back up to her lips… It was much too early for this, truly, and the wrong day for it as well. Too late to, forgive her for thinking this, put the cat back in the bag though. She’d brought it up, she had to see it through. “I appreciate it.”  
  
“They are very understanding,” Kali agreed. “And they do appreciate what you’re doing for them either way. Unlocking his Aura helped to ameliorate some of their worries.”  
  
“The thought of you and Blake not being enough astounds me.”  
  
“Enough? Us? Of course not.” Kali smiled widely, a perfectly natural look on her...after she closed her eyes. She did it better than most Faunus Glynda knew of (Most being **_any_**), smiling, but it didn’t _quite_ reach… Sometimes, being a Huntress of her caliber, being trained to read body language as she had been, was a bother. “They are parents. They worry.”  
  
Glynda knew overprotective parents, but this really took the cake.  
  
Blake was an ambush predator of the highest tier. More than a match for any one of Glynda’s younger students on a one-on-one match in the open even without the element of surprise and more than capable of vanishing after all was said and done. Kali? … Glynda gave her more than even odds of taking out one of the newer models of Atlas Paladins with her bare hands...while in the snow...and in the nude.  
  
Yes. Kali on her own was more than enough protection for any one individual. Overkill didn’t even begin to explain it but, as long as Jaune’s parents were happy…?  
  
“It would help if he was a little more confident, in all respects,” Glynda admitted reluctantly. She didn’t like saying anything negative about her students, even taking Jaune’s extraordinary circumstances into account. “Apparently, Peach’s class is rather...”  
  
“Horrifying, yes. Realistic, but horrifying for some that haven’t been exposed to such... He has been rather sheltered,” Kali acknowledged easily. “I understand what you mean, but I am no miracle worker. I can only do so much.” Proving that the bacon pile she had in hand was a lot bigger than it looked, or that she’d snuck some extra somewhere, Kali took another bite. “That I’ve only just recently started working on his bedroom confidence is as much as I can do at once, I’m afraid. The rest will follow in due time.”  
  
Despite not having anything in her mouth at the time, Glynda_ still _managed to choke on her drink.  
  
Kali continued, “he is surprisingly - gifted. Not perfect of course, seeing as it was his first time, but I believe that he’ll be more than capable of pleasing anyone that would be so lucky as to marry him… That is important.” The Faunus hummed while Glynda continued to sputter. “A healthy marriage’s foundations are laid in the bedroom...or so is my experience.”  
  
Glynda started to wheeze even as she wiped her mouth with a tissue, conveniently nearby on a small table right next to her chair. Ready for everything, was Glynda. “E-excuse me? He’s having you do _what_?”  
  
If...if he was abusing his control over one of his Faunus in _her _house, words would be had. None of them that he’d like, that was for sure, but words would be had. It might have not been, technically, _illegal_, but Glynda found that sort of thing distasteful in the extreme. Distasteful, and as a sign of _things _she would greatly prefer not to see in her students.  
  
The willingness to abuse one’s power over those that were weaker than you, or just unable to fight back, wasn’t often left behind as soon as one left the schoolyard...and that explained the limb that Kali had come in with, didn’t it?  
  
“Now you’re just being silly. He didn’t make me do anything.” Kali tittered from behind her sleeve, her eyes narrowed in simulated amusement. “The boy thought he was having a dying dream when I came into his room in nothing but a low cut maid outfit and heels. If the thought of ordering me to do so had ever crossed his mind, he’d have been overcome with guilt whenever he looked at me for the rest of the day. You really do run them ragged.”  
  
“Then - why?”  
  
“Why? That is a question. Why?” For once, Kali looked as if she had nothing to say. Her eyes tracked away from Glynda; She went quiet as her brow furrowed lightly in thought and she tapped a finger on the rest of her chair. The bacon, cooling, was put to the side. “I don’t believe I have a reference for it that you’ll be able to understand. Not really.” Her eyes snapped back to the blonde. Unblinking. Flat. “How old do you think I am?”  
  
Glynda, taken aback, blinked and came back with a line that she’d learned by rote… Or just about. As good as, when the woman before her had been so important to her family and her very own existence… Mistral, during the war, had not been a good place. Not for them. “I… I’d suppose you’d be in your eighties? Eighty-four?”  
  
“If you mean as a Faunus, you aren’t wrong.” Kali’s lips pursed, the staccato drumming of her fingers becoming louder. “Not all of us, the older ones, forget what we used to be when we go through the process. It isn’t often talked about, but it happens. I suppose you can understand what I mean.”  
  
Glynda, slowly and carefully, nodded. Her every muscle tensed, her eyes scanning the Faunus up and down for any errant twitches or tensing of its own even as she took another drink. “I suppose I can.”  
  
Yet another thing she’d known. She’d never had any Faunus she’d spoken to _admit it_, but she’d been aware of the possibility...and that it often resulted in someone dead or dying. Not exactly a comfortable position to be in, and just her luck if that was to be the case.  
  
“Grimm have a very simple existence...if you can call it an existence. They’re less than animals, really. They… _I_ had the mannerisms of an animal down pat in my time as a Cait Sith. Just like the rest.” The drumming turned to solid thuds, the padding of the armest the only thing keeping Kali from chipping the wood. “Finding a good place to sun myself, grooming, ambush tactics. The sort of things you’d expect in a feline...and all I was doing was going through the motions...until I wasn’t.”  
  
Glynda looked on quietly, fascinated despite herself as she watched Kali who, obviously upset (She had to be faking it. Had to be.), had started fingering the lines under her eyes. The markings that a life well lived left behind, laughter lines and the signs of age; all part of the process that had resulted in her creation, there to stay.  
  
“I was two-hundred or so when I started ‘thinking’.” The disgust in that word, thinking, was entirely implied...but easily heard. “Three-hundred when I took over my own hunting grounds from the Cait Sith before me. Four when Vale needed its edge against the aggression of Mantle and found it in my kind and I.” Kali’s ears flicked, hard enough to hear as she let a breath out through her nose. “After four-hundred wasted years, I had a mind of my own. People I could talk to, things I could taste. A life to live… I found _purpose_.”  
  
Kali had been right. Glynda found the idea behind that, such a long life and - everything that came with it, hard to imagine. The closest comparison that she could find was that, one day, Kali had had just came into existence. Came into it with centuries of memories, yes, but with none of them _hers_ as she was now.  
  
That was the closest comparison that Glynda could come up with and, somehow, she felt that it was woefully inadequate...and imagine. All she’d wanted to ask was about a marriage that might or might not happen.  
  
Where had her easy Saturday gone?  
  
“For the last eighty years, Arc has been my purpose. A person. A family. Arc.” The dark weight that had fallen over Kali’s features fell away as if they’d never been; with a smile and her ears standing at attention as she leaned towards Glynda with conspiratorial intent. That Glynda didn’t lean _back _was a point of pride for her. “If he needs my help then I’ll help, whatever it might be that he needs help with… I have to say that this isn’t the worst thing we could be doing together though. He’s _just _good enough to make it fun.“  
  
Glynda felt a rush of heat settle in her cheeks as she adjusted her glasses with a scowl. “That - is no concern of mine I would think. What happens between two consenting individuals…” In her house, she refused to add. That would mean it was her problem after all and she’d had enough of those put on her plate today...one of them being whether Kali was as soulless as she should have been. That sort of initiative and focus and introspective reflection was - worrisome. “I don’t require details, thank you.”  
  
“You may not require them, but what’s a little gossip between a guest and their host? You can’t say that you aren’t a little curious, can you?”  
  
Before any more talk could be had, and before Kali could embarrass or disturb her ‘host’ more than she already had, Jaune swept into the room like a messy blonde hurricane. A hurricane with a pair of trays in either hand that had Kali instantly standing at attention, her gaze perfectly focused on the promise of food… Good food at that.  
  
Jaune was many things, but a bad cook was not one of them… Glynda looked forward to moments like these more than she’d like to admit.  
  
“Has anyone seen Blake?” Jaune asked as he handed both trays off to their respective destinations. Right into their laps… How sweet. “I haven’t seen her once today and I’m starting to get worried.”  
  
That it wasn’t for _her _didn’t need to be said. Blake could take care of herself. The object(s) of her attention though…? That was an entirely different story.  
  
“Probably stalking the Schnee girl again, as she does. Her fault for wearing Silvervine perfume, really. You’d think that Weiss would know better, seeing what her family does to make their fortune.” Kali sniffed disdainfully as she dumped her slightly colder bacon into the warmer and gave it a mix. “She’ll be back before the food is all gone, don’t you worry.”  
  
How Kali could shift gears like that, so quickly and easily, continued to amaze.  
  
“That’s true...but that’s Weiss’s problem, isn’t it?” Jaune sighed before he turned to Glynda with a light in his eyes that had been, well, _missing _over the last few weeks. A zeal for life. Shoulders back, chest out. Almost standing up straight as he met her eyes. A marked improvement… Damn it. That there were visible results made it hard to argue against Kali’s reasons for her actions. “Is there something wrong with the food, Miss Goodwitch?”  
  
Glynda blinked and looked down. Down at the smiley-face made up of a pair of sunny-side up eggs and a strip of heavily layered bacon. At the side of muffins, split in two and evenly covered with a spread of strawberry. Then, she looked up again and gave him a small and somewhat shaky smile with a shake of the head.  
  
“No. No, of course not.” Spearing a bit of egg right through with her fork put action to her words. “I was just thinking, was all.”  
  
She supposed that, if anything did come of them, him having experienced all that Kali could give him wouldn’t be all bad... Also, wait a second.  
  
Was that where her heels had gone?


	7. Chapter 7

Blake didn’t really understand the concept of a weekend. She knew what one _was_, don’t get her wrong. She wasn’t an idiot. Weekends just didn’t have the same connotations for her as it did for those she’d been created to interact with. Young humans. Those her assumed age that she could mingle with and use as a cover with something as easy as a bow being placed atop her head before she struck.  
  
She’d been allowed some leeway here, in whatever she did. A little slack in the leash that could be tightened until she choked in a second… Kali was watching. Always.  
  
Anyway, yes. Weekends. Weekends were an excuse for her charge to slack off. To sleep in. To gorge himself on whatever junk food that hadn’t already been - appropriated - for the sake of his diet and be, otherwise, a layabout.  
  
Blake had no such luxury. Every day, every hour was work of some sort. Scouting out the school, memorizing the city and its alleyways for any future problems that could pop up. If escape were to ever be necessary, she knew of at least five different ways of slipping away and into the wilderness with Jaune within thirty minutes or less. Another ten that would take longer, up to an hour, but would work out for the best if they were being looked for in particular.  
  
Her periodic naps under the nearest sunbeam that she could find were a part of that work and little else. She didn’t keep normal hours. Her nights were spent on better things...and trying to keep her mind off of the Schnee girl and her perfume.  
  
Kali disapproved...and Blake understood as to why that would be. She was close to the Silver Eyes… Blake, once again, understood, but often found herself ‘lost’ and going in the same direction as Weiss anyway... There was just something about Weiss that Blake found _fascinating_, even beyond the silvervine that had drawn Blake to her in the first place. If Weiss was alone if she was away from the Silver Eyed One...then there was nothing to complain about, was there?  
  
With a long stretch that had her back arching and her bones popping from head to toe, she adjusted. Slid out the window and away, past the happily chirping birds in the branches across from her, their possible death just feet away and getting farther as she wound her way down the trunk and went to work.  
  
A little earlier in the day than she usually did, but work all the same. It was something small that had changed the course of her life, as usual. Just a slight shift in the breeze. _A feeling_ that refused to leave her until she did something about, more than enough cause to pull her out of her rest until her curiosity was sated and any doubts that it was a danger was put to rest.  
  
Jaune, her Primary, required the extra protection and near paranoiac habits from her to keep him safe. One attempted kidnapping. Two near muggings. A single pickpocket that had walked away with a broken wrist after a short chase that had led to her putting Jaune’s wallet back with him none the wiser for it.  
  
Blake had no idea what he’d have done without her. That her creators, his parents and extended family, had assigned her to him had been one of their better choices in their lives...and it was looking as if she was about to reinforce that choice yet again.  
  
She was entirely alert, her internal alarms ringing as she came upon a trio of men in cheap, black-and-red color-coordinated suits and mass-produced machetes at their waists, trying to act nonchalant while standing at the entrance to an alley… Which, it is to say, wasn’t much. That their side of the street was near entirely empty hadn’t seemed to register to them from what Blake could tell, the promise of silly amounts of money blinding them to the reality of their situation.  
  
They were after Jaune, of course. They were _always_ after Jaune...that they hadn’t thought about the consequences involved in a small-time gang kidnapping a child of one of the biggest military outfitters on Remnant was obvious. Oh, sure, the Arcs were responsible for luxury products as well, but their main selling point was in the quality of their military Faunus. Their colonial adjutants and frontier sweepers.  
  
No matter the size of an inner city gang, or their assumed power, a cadre of ten of her model would have them bleeding out in record time; power and numbers going down the drain as their every safehouse was cracked open. Their leaders interrogated. Jaune extracted... All before the cleanup, just before the final wave of shock troopers swept them from the field.  
  
Having more than three of her type in close proximity might not have been strictly legal, but that wasn’t really her problem. If that was ever required of her, she’d go and do what she had to. What came after wasn’t her problem… And Kali said they would most likely just get a fine for littering anyway. A slap on the wrist, at most.  
  
Getting in the way of Arc business over something as small as that would be...unwise. Economically unwise. Next voting period unwise… That sort of thing, implied strongarming, might not have been exactly fair of the system, but as it was working in her favor, she could overlook it. Once again, that wasn’t her problem. Blake had her purpose and that wasn’t it, so the point was moot.  
  
Shimmying her way up a nearby drain pipe had her on the roof in seconds. A quick few steps forward and to the edge of the building she was on, a bakery from the smell of it, and she was looking down on her prey. Blake didn’t even bother to conceal herself overmuch, just the basics as she found them completely oblivious as to her presence.  
  
Hunter. Civilian. Grimm. It didn’t matter. They never looked up.  
  
“It’ll be the easiest score ever, boys,” the one farthest from the mouth of the ally said, the other two nodding dumbly in understanding while Blake’s already low estimation of their mental abilities fell yet further. “It’s just some teenage pushover, an Ivory-Tower professor, and two freaking Faunus. All you have to do is bark some orders out and all we’ll have is the kid and the teacher to deal with.”  
  
Blake understood what a facepalm was. She also understood why humans did it. She didn’t do it right then, being utterly unwilling to remove the three from her sight, but this was just _awful._  
  
There was stupid and then there was _stupid_. Ivory-Tower professor? Blake supposed that was true, if only in the most literal sense, but _wow_. Also, had they even met a Faunus before? Any of them? They’d only do something like that if they were ordered to by their owner or by a lawful authority, judgment permitting... If they could even afford a Faunus between them, even a budget model, Blake would be surprised.  
  
Anyone that had lent theirs to them, if anyone at all, was an even bigger idiot than these three were.  
  
“Yeah,” Thug number two joined in with a neanderthalic drawl that had Blake’s ears pressing against her skull in response. “They do anything you say, heh heh.” With that ‘laugh’ (he’d actually said ‘heh’, twice), the other two joined him with some perverted laughter of their own as they, as one, turned to face the ally’s exit.  
  
Blake, at this point, had had enough. Not only were they a threat to her charge, but they were also a threat to her brain. She stood on the ledge, her subconscious doing all the hard work for her as to how she’d take them down… And, then, she stepped off, the wind momentarily whistling in her ears before she hit her target.  
  
Bullseye.  
  
The wind was replaced by screams. The dull thunk of dislocated shoulders and the snap of a broken collarbone as she put a foot on each of the lead goon’s shoulders. The one at the back, separated from the pack. A kick-off of him worsened his condition, leaving him free to do nothing but writhe and try not to drown in his own vomit while she vanished into the dark.  
  
They hadn’t even had the chance to see what she’d done before she was gone, waiting for the right moment to take the last two out of the game.   
  
So - _familiar_.  
  
“The hell was that!?” Mook two called to Mook three as, on reflex, he bent down to check on the man Blake had crippled. Just a touch on his shoulder, yet again on reflex, led to him screaming one last time before the pain overtook him and he fainted... Fool. That number three joined in on the crowding only made their already bad situation worse. “Holy fuck, Benny! Something fucking got-”  
  
Blake slid into range from around a dumpster, the index and middle fingers of both hands straight and stiff; purple paint on razored nails driving into one man’s heel through his shoe and the back of the other’s knee, dropping them with screams of their own before she was gone again, blood staining her polish.  
  
She’d just applied it that morning. Shame. That they stood up again, trash blades in their hands and more than ready to use them, bad as they were and hard as it was to stand, was an even bigger shame.  
  
What she was looking at couldn’t be mistaken for bravery. Just stupidity. They didn’t even have Aura. What hope did they have against something they had yet to have even caught a glimpse of, something that had already taken out one of their number unseen? … None. They had none.  
  
She should have hit them harder. Her mistake. Blake was used to humans with an IQ higher than room temperature. This was a learning experience.  
  
“Come the fuck out, you bastards!” Three shouted to two, the ‘them’ as good as screaming that they had no idea what she even looked like or that she was the only one attacking them… The idiocy here was just _astounding_. The smart thing to do would have been to escape out into the main thoroughfare and calling for medical attention instead of fighting an invisible monster in the shadows… She supposed that swarm tactics were almost smart, in an animal sort of way. They had that going for them at least. “Do it now and we’ll make it quick!”  
  
That he stepped _forward_, walked into the dark while wounded and while wearing sunglasses was… If Blake had been capable of feeling sadness, she might have felt it. What little combat ability they might have had, had just vanished entirely.  
  
She stepped out of the shadows and started on clean up. That was all this was. Clean up. Pest control. Disappointment.  
  
Blake crushed two’s instep (today was not a good day for their feet), setting her ribbon to work around three’s neck as a very distracting garotte. Nowhere near thin enough to do the job in a timely and efficient manner. More than enough to remind them that air was something that they dearly needed and for them to focus on it to the exclusivity of all else, even when that all else was her methodical dismantling of his fellow criminal.  
  
Instep, instep. Forced extension of the left arm, knee to the elbow. Two open fractures. Immediate surgical intervention required. Complete return of functionality, unlikely. Fist to the solar plexus, flat-handed chop to the carotid. Instant unconsciousness: extended. Screams: silenced. Threat Two, neutralized.  
  
Threat Three. Heel to the back of the already injured knee. Forced drop. Tendons, cut. Commence tightening of strangulation tool. Stop. Hold. Wait until struggles stop, then release. Broken nose. Possible facial lacerations from broken glass as lens over eyes shatter on contact with alley floor. Count to five… Threat Three, neutralized.  
  
Done. Easy.  
  
A quick pat down led to a bit of a windfall on her part. About five-hundred Lein between the three of them and an unlocked scroll that looked like it had, at best, three viruses on it to the other’s ten. After tying her bow back on and pocketing the money (there was some tuna in her future, yes there was) she dialed Vale PD and medical services, dropped the scroll into a puddle, and scaled her way back up above street level.  
  
No one would have to know about this. No one but Kali, of course, no matter how much Blake would wish otherwise. She’d suss out what Blake had done as soon as she came within reach of the windows. Tribute would be paid, one way or another...trout, maybe? No… Salmon. It would be salmon. Just the right price for an almost equal share.  
  
Her daily tuna melt for the month was just going to have to wait...and it would have to wait a little while longer, as long as it took for her to find Jaune again. Not long. Not at all. He did much the same thing on the weekend, every weekend. He was a creature of habit. Terrible, aggravating habit.  
  
If not for that, she’d have been free to rest in a puddle of sunlight for longer than an hour. If even idiots such as the ones she’d just put down could recognize the pattern he’d set for himself, then he was doing something wrong. Horribly wrong… All it was doing was making more work for her. Would it hurt him to skip a week? To change the hour he arrived at the bookstore, mayhaps?  
  
Seeing as he hadn’t over the course of several months, she had to assume it would.  
  
Blake had to say, she didn’t see much of a point in the comics he brought home. Too - naive. Unrealistic. There was no real tension or stakes to be found. It was not at all what she could have considered ‘enjoyable’ or ‘interesting’, for a given value of either of those things. She’d spent all of five minutes on an especially lazy afternoon on them and was more than able to feel somewhat regretful that she’d spent even that long.  
  
Ah, well… She would find something to occupy herself until closing time, as always. It wouldn’t be difficult. There were several things that her imprinting hadn’t covered. Hadn’t covered, or just hadn’t covered in an in-depth manner. Questions that Kali had brought up out loud and others that Blake had come up with her own… That Kali might have been involved in that as well was a rather odd coincidence, but they were still questions she needed to ask.  
  
Human male/female interactions. What were they? How had a change of clothes and the assumption of a role changed the relationship between Jaune and Kali in the way it had? What had been the subtext, the impetus behind it?  
  
Her infiltration training hadn’t covered that. Such a weakness could not be allowed to stay, and she was more than willing to rectify it, whatever it took… That Kali had just told her to ‘figure it out on her own’ hadn’t been what she’d hoped for, but still.   
  
Whatever it took.  
  
She went from roof to roof. Remained unseen, only pausing in her advance to readjust her heading as Jaune meandered his way down the streets of Vale… She didn’t require line of sight in this case. Scent tracking wasn’t beyond her, and Jaune was rather - distinctive. That she’d had him just about beaten into her mind, down to his tiniest detail, just made it easy.  
  
… Of course, that advantage didn’t mean that she could be sloppy. Eyes on the primary, often as possible.  
  
Sifting gravel, the ends of her feet pushing her over it near soundlessly as she took sporadic looks over the edge of whatever roof she was on… A cementing of her vendetta against everything small, feathery, and disease-ridden as she found herself forced to factor pigeon droppings into her watch; her unplanned mission already having more than enough problems to it for her peace of mind.  
  
Keeping to the shadows was - not the easiest thing to do up here. Being effectively out in the open had her feeling twitchy. Uncomfortable, or whatever word it was that could be applied to her… It was close enough for Huntsman work. More than enough to get her to where she was going with a minimal amount of fuss or danger.  
  
Of course, minimal didn’t mean none. Paranoia, as Kali had once told her, wasn’t always a disease. In the life they lived, unlike the greater part of their kind, it was a way of life. A survival trait... At the first sign of oddly placed sun glare, or the feeling that she wasn’t alone, she’d be gone. Off and away with Jaune over her shoulder, with him no doubt unhappy about her interfering in his daily life.  
  
Better safe than sorry was her idea. It wasn’t very complicated, just common sense.  
  
While waiting on the roof of said bookstore as soon as she reached it, ‘Borderless Books’, was rather boring...it wasn’t a very long wait. The cloud that Blake had taken the time to watch from out of the corner of her eye hadn’t even noticeably moved yet by the time Jaune came around, his bag weighed down by his customary junk food and drink… Another thirty seconds, long enough that he had entrenched himself in the illustrated fiction section with little signs of leaving that Blake could see through the skylight, did Blake enter as well...and she couldn’t help but sneeze.  
  
Dust. Regular, every day, dust was her first observation. It was in the air, on the shelves. Doing its damndest to climb up her nose along with the heavy scent of aged paper, long-dried ink, and ancient leather.  
  
She sneezed again, this time to get a chuckle from the cashier, an elderly woman, in return.  
  
“I’m sorry about the dust,” the cashier apologized, hitting on the problem instantly with the ease of someone that had heard it a hundred times before. “Hazards of the job, you see.”  
  
Blake, with another sneeze and a slight watering of the eyes, nodded. She did, in fact, see. Anything that could cause her to break cover like this could only be called a hazard.  
  
“You’ll get used to it, I’m sure. Most do,” the cashier continued with a nod of her own, the chain attached to either side of her glasses set to swaying due to her movements… And Blake had to forcefully hold herself back from batting at them. That she didn’t move from where she was standing was a spot of pride for her. “What are you looking for, dearie? I haven’t seen you here before but, if I can help, I’d be happy to!”  
  
“Thank you. And I hope so. There’s a good chance I’ll be in this store often. Not getting used to this would be a problem.” Blake slapped on a smile, a small one. Not nearly large enough to give what she was away, just large enough to be rather pleasant as long as one didn’t look too closely at the eyes… The eyes that she was now rubbing, using the dust as an excuse. “I’m looking for…” Blake searched her thoughts and came up with something that sounded about right. “Adult romance?”  
  
The woman behind the counter blinked, then smiled right back. Wider. More expressive. Honest as a glint of humor appeared in her eyes. “Adult romance, hmm? Ah, to be young again…” She tittered suspiciously, and pointed a bent finger down an aisle, its lights set slightly lower than the rest. “You’ll find something for your tastes if you look hard enough, don’t you worry.”  
  
“Do I have to buy before I read, or-”  
  
The elderly lady flapped her hand at Blake and hushed her. “Don’t you worry about a thing, dearie. Take your time. No point in buying something only to find out it isn’t for you. That would be a shame.” Then she leaned forward over the counter, her arms trembling on top, and whispered, “if you need to keep your purchases private, we have several rather tasteful bags and covers available.”  
  
Privacy…? For books? That was - odd.  
  
“Oh. Alright. Thank you again.” Blake waved and, as she walked away and into the aisle, her smile vanished, its purpose fulfilled.  
  
She was just getting books. Why had the woman made it sound like such a big deal? … Blake supposed that she was going to have to find out.  
  
==========  
  
Blake, with her ears standing straight up from under her bow, turned a page. Thought on it. Came to a conclusion. “I see. That explains it.” Another page. “Humans are strange.”  
  
She’d already known that, of course, but it was nice to have confirmation.


End file.
